Niklas Buergi

Niklas Buergi is a postdoctoral researcher in Peter Dayan's group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. His research focuses on understanding how human and artificial agents learn from and interact with one another, and how these processes may be altered in individuals with mental disorders through combining behavioural experiments, neuroimaging, and computational modeling.

His primary research areas include:

• Social Cognition and Mentalization (inferring others' emotions and intentions)
• Computational Neuroscience and Neural Decoding
• Neuroimaging of socio-affective processes
• Cognitive alterations in mental disorders

Dr. Buergi's recent work reveals groundbreaking insights into adaptive mentalization processes, demonstrating how neural activity can serve as a 'fingerprint' predicting how individuals adjust their beliefs about others' strategies during social interactions. His depression research has identified hyperconnectivity in introspective socio-affective brain networks during reflection on relationship experiences.

Professional recognition includes:

• Dissertation awarded the annual award for excellent scholarly work by the University of Zurich

Prior to his current position, Dr. Buergi completed his PhD at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics (ZNE) focusing on computational models of social reasoning. His educational background includes Clinical Psychology and Neuroinformatics, complemented by extensive clinical experience at the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich (Burghölzli), psychiatric day hospitals (PUK), and neuropsychology units (USZ).