IRENE SOPHIA PLANK

I am a Marie Curie fellow and researcher at the HAVIC lab at Flinders University in Adelaide, Austalia. Before this post, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the NEVIA group led by Prof. Christine Falter-Wagner at the LMU Klinikum in Munich and I am still affiliated with that group, leading an EU funded collaboration project between Australia and Germany.

I am interested in social understanding of other's in the brain and how it is influenced by our life experiences and the person we want to understand. I conduct experiments investigating social cognition as well as virtual interactions, looking at both individual and dyadic parameters. My current project focuses on how we can facilitate prosocial behaviour in virtual reality.
 
In 2021, I finished my PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. As a PhD candidate, I was affiliated with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain as well as the Einstein Center for Neurosciences Berlin. My supervisors were Prof. Felix Bermpohl and Prof. Isabel Dziobek. My doctoral project investigated the influence of motherhood on empathy and mentalising, also called theory of mind.
 
Additionally, I am very passionate about Open Science and reproducibility. You can find my data and scripts on OSF and GitHub. 

During my PhD, I taught at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam. Topics range from coding over experimental design to the neuroscience of empathy. You can find examples here! 
 
Before starting my PhD, I completed two Master's courses, one in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and one in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience from the Free University of Berlin. For more information on my education and experience, visit my CV section!