Soyoung Park
German Institute for Human Nutrition & Charité - Universitätsklinik Berlin
Title
Body-brain interaction as driving force for human adaptation
© David Ausserhofer
Abstract
What food to eat and when to eat can impact the dynamics of neurotransmitter systems, such as dopamine, thereby modulating brain function and resulting behavior. On the other hand, such food preferences are shaped by diverse intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Here I present a series studies that show how the body and the brain interact to enable human adaptation.
Biosketch
Soyoung Q. Park is a professor of Nutrition Neuroscience at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and heads the department of Decision Neuroscience and Nutrition at German Institute for Human Nutrition. Her research focuses on the metabolic, neural and social mechanisms underlying human decision making, with the ultimate goal to develop novel intervention strategies to shape and optimize choices. Here, the reward-based decisions, such as consumer decisions and decisions in social contexts are at focus. She studied Psychology at the Institute of Technology Berlin (Germany) and received her PhD in Neuroscience from the Free University of Berlin, after her stay as a stipend holder at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at the Humboldt University. After her PhD, she moved to Switzerland for a postdoctoral research training at the department of economics at the University of Zurich. Before moving to Berlin/Potsdam, she was a professor for social psychology and decision neuroscience at the University of Lübeck, Germany, where she was headed the Psychology degree program (B.A. and M.A.).