Prof. Heleen Slagter, Ph.D.

Heleen Slagter is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the VU Amsterdam. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2005 on the neural mechanisms underlying top-down control of attention, based on EEG and fMRI work conducted at the University of Amsterdam and at Duke University. She then spent four years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a postdoctoral researcher, where she pioneered research on mental training of attention, as cultivated by meditation. In 2009, she returned to the University of Amsterdam and set up the Cognition and Plasticity Lab. In 2019, she and her lab moved to the VU Amsterdam. Her work has garnered awards and funding, including an ERC Starting and an ERC Consolidator Grant, and an early career award by the Society for Psychophysiological Research. Slagter has a longstanding track record in investigating the neural basis and plasticity of attention and perception.

She is a Visiting Fellow in July 2022 in the context of the CAS Research Group „Handling Visual Distraction" led by Prof. Dr. Hermann Müller.