Christian Keysers - Biography#
Christian Keysers is French and German and was born in 1973 in Belgium. He studied psychology and biology in Germany and the US before making his PhD in neuroscience in St Andrews with David Perrett. In 2000 he joined the team of Giacomo Rizzolatti as a postdoc in Parma (Italy) and showed that mirror neurons respond to both the sound and the sight of actions, a discovery that became on of the most cited neuroscience papers and influenced theories of the evolution of spoken language. He then moved to become an assistant professor in the Netherlands, and his independent work lead to the discovery that the notion of mirror neurons extends from the motor system to the limbic and tactile system, seeding what is now one of the most flourishing fields of social neuroscience: investigating the neural basis of empathy.
The over 7000 citations to his work illustrate his deep influence on the field, the fact that about half of these citations come from outside his field of neuroscience, including psychology (36% of citations), engineering and computer sciences (12%), medical sciences (11%) and the humanities (8%) is a testimony to the multidisciplinary progress his work has facilitated. Since 2010, he leads the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and is full professor for social neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam.
He is ranked amongst the top 1% most influential scientists based on citations (h=38). He obtained several prestigious grants (e.g. VICI, VIDI, Marie Curie Excellence Grant, ERC). He is an editorial board member of key journals in the field of social neuroscience (SCAN, Social Neuroscience, Phil. Trans. B ) and in the advisory board of Future and Emerging Technologies at the European Commission. He is actively engaging in shaping European research policy: as an elected member of the board of the Young Academy of Europe he promotes basic research and funding for such research. His passion for science dissemination lead him to write the award-winning book The Empathic Brain.
