Tania Singer is a professor of social neuroscience and psychology and heads the Max Planck Society’s Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. After her PhD in psychology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in 2000, she worked at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience, at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London, and held the inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zürich. She is a world expert on compassion and empathy, and has a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact. Her research focus is on the hormonal, neuronal, and developmental basis of human sociality, empathy, and compassion, and their malleability through mental training. She has initiated and headed one of the largest meditation-based secular mental training studies on compassion, the ReSource project. Linking such findings to the field of (neuro)economics, she developed a Caring Economics approach, developing new models of economy based on care and social cohesion. She is also heading the CovSocial project, a large-scale study on stress, resilience and social cohesion in Berliners during the corona crisis. Presently, she works on the Edu:Social project aiming at bringing partner-based mental training formats, so-called Dyads, into education and health-care settings to boost resilience and social competencies. Tania Singer is the author of more than 160 scientific articles (e.g., Science, Nature) and book chapters and edited together with Matthieu Ricard the two books Caring Economics (2015) and Power and Care (2019), based on two Mind and Life conferences with His Holiness the Dalai Lama she helped organize. She served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018 and was co-founder of Mind and Life Europe. Throughout her life she has explored how inner change can bring about societal change putting science in the service of societal transformation.
Tania Singer served on the Mind & Life Board of Directors from 2012 to 2018.
