Julia F. Christensen

Dr. Julia F. Christensen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Warburg Institute, London, working with the B.I.A.S. project under Prof Manos Tsakiris, while maintaining an active affiliation with City St George's, University of London as an academic researcher. She is also an honorary member of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, reflecting her cross-institutional collaborations in cognitive neuroscience and psychology.

Her educational background combines professional dance training with advanced neuroscience research, culminating in a PhD from the University of the Balearic Islands and University of Vienna. Her doctoral work investigated affective responses to expressive body movement, supervised by Professor Camilo Cela-Conde and Dr. Marcos Nadal.

Dr. Christensen's research focuses on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of emotional expertise, particularly in dancers and artists. She examines how movement expertise modulates emotional perception, interoception, and sense of agency through behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging methods. Her work bridges dance science, moral psychology, and neuroethics, exploring topics from evolutionary functions of art to legal responsibility in emotional contexts.

Analysis of her publications reveals strong interdisciplinary trends connecting emotion science with movement expertise, particularly in dance perception and agency modulation. Her research consistently demonstrates how specialized training alters neural processing of emotional stimuli, with significant contributions to understanding autism through interoceptive frameworks and exploring moral cognition through intentional binding paradigms.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• Newton International Research Fellow (British Academy, 2015-2017)

Dr. Christensen has secured competitive research funding from the British Academy (2015-2017) and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (2010-2014). Her current collaborations include the B.I.A.S. project at the Warburg Institute and ongoing work with City St George's on emotion perception frameworks, building on previous affiliations with City University's Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit and Autism Research Group.

She is embedded in multiple research ecosystems including the Warburg Institute's dance movement library project, City St George's psychology department collaborations, and UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience networks, where she previously investigated sense of agency under Professor Patrick Haggard.