Emily S. Cross

As the co-director of the Social Brain in Action Lab (www.soba-lab.com) and the PI on the ERC Starting Grant 'Social Robots' (www.so-bots.com), Emily leads a team who explores experience-dependent plasticity in the human brain and behaviour using neuroimaging, neurostimulation and behavioural techniques. Her research group is currently split between the University of Glasgow in bonnie Scotland, where Emily holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Social Robotics, and Macquarie University in Sydney, where she holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Human Neuroscience. As she is particularly interested in complex action learning and perception, she often incorporates into her research action experts and training paradigms from highly skilled motor domains, such as dance, music, gymnastics, contortion, and acrobatics. In addition, she has a longstanding interest in aesthetic perception, and one strand of her team's work is to explore the impact of affective experience on how we perceive others. More recently, as part of the 'Social Robots' project, she leads a fabulous group of trainee researchers (known collectively as #TeamSoBots) in examining the role of social experience and expectations shape how we perceive and interact with robots. Her primary research tools are functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic imaging (TMS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), reaction time measures, and behavioural training paradigms. For more information, please visit her lab website at www.soba-lab.com, and the ERC 'Social Robots' project at www.so-bots.com - or find her on Twitter at @brain_on_dance