BEN BECKER

Head, Becker Lab

Email: ben_becker (@) gmx.de

Benjamin Becker is currently a Full Professor at The University of Hong Kong (HKU, Department of Psychology) and Agreement Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC, School of Life Science and Technology). He received his Master and PhD Degrees at the Universities of Trier and Duesseldorf in Germany and underwent further training in Affective Neuroscience and advanced neuroimaging at the University of Bonn (Germany) before he established research teams as specially recruited high-level expert Professor at the UESTC since 2015 and as Full Professor at the HKU since 2023.

His research aims to explore how the human brain generates and regulates emotional experiences, how these processes become dysfunctional in mental disorders and how these processes can be modulated by innovative technological and pharmacological means. To this end his team capitalizes on an entire array of strategies, including advanced neuroimaging, AI-inspired neural decoding, real-time fMRI neurofeedback and pharmacological neuroenhancement (oxytocin, angiotensin II, etc). The endeavors led to more than 230 publications in scientific journals including Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews in Psychology, Advanced Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, PNAS, Molecular Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, among others (>9000 citations, h-index 50, i10>160), and the findings have been featured in numerous media reports by the New York Times, Forbes, Xinhua, etc.

Professor Benjamin Becker has led numerous competitive and talent projects, including projects from the German Research Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation. He currently serves on the editorial boards of international journals such as Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Psychopharmacology, and Psychoradiology, and was the founding editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Social and Affective Neuroimaging. He is co-director of the Brain Dysfunction Initiative initiated by COVID, the Global Brain Coalition and currently coordinates the Cognitive Science Programme at the HKU.