Ernst Pöppel - Biography#

Ernst Pöppel has been founder and Director of the Institute of Medical Psychology, and founder and Chairman of the Human Science Center of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich, Germany. As former Board Member of the National Research Center Jülich he was responsible for Life Sciences (Brain Research, Biotechnology) and Environmental Research. Since 2002 he is Guest Professor of Peking University, and he has cooperated with scientists from some 40 countries.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (ML), Germany, and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Salzburg. Previously he has worked at the Department of Psychology and Brain Science of MIT, Cambridge / USA, and at the Max-Planck-Institutes of Behavioral Physiology and Psychiatry, Germany.

His research in brain science and psychology is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach integrating knowledge from different fields of expertise.

He has written some 300 scientific articles and many books, also for the general public. With his colleagues he is considered to have discovered the phenomenon of residual vision, later named "blindsight". He has supervised more than 200 doctoral theses at LMU and at the Leopold-Franzens University in Innsbruck, Austria. A particular challenge he sees in the connection between basic research and applications, i.e., to make results in psychology and brain science accessible for better education, intercultural understanding, technological developments, new therapies of patients in medicine, economic and political judgments, or the appreciation of the arts. His political motto is: "Scientists are natural ambassadors"