Wolf Singer is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and Founding Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Brain Research. He studied medicine at the Universities of Munich and Paris, received his M.D. from the Ludwig Maximilian University and his Ph.D. from the Technical University in Munich.
Until the mid-eighties his research interests were focused on the experience-dependent development of the cerebral cortex and on mechanisms of use-dependent synaptic plasticity. Subsequently, his research concentrated on the binding problem that arises from the distributed organization of the cerebral cortex. The hypothesis forwarded by Professor Singer is that the numerous and widely distributed subprocesses which constitute the basis of cognitive and executive functions are coordinated and bound together by the precise temporal synchronization of oscillatory neuronal activity.
Professor Singer has published more than 300 articles in peer reviewed journals, contributed more than 200 chapters to books, written numerous essays on the ethical and philosophical implications of neuroscientific discoveries, and published 3 books. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the IPSEN Prize for Neuronal Plasticity, the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, the Zülch Prize for Brain Research, the Communicator Prize of the German Research Foundation and the INNS Hebb Award. Prof. Singer was awarded a Dr. h.c. from Oldenburg University and Rutgers University, N.J. He is member of numerous national and international academies, including the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He served as President of the European Neuroscience Association, as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Society, and is member of numerous advisory boards of scientific organizations and editorial boards of scientific journals.
Dekila Chungyalpa is the Co-Founder and Director of the Loka Initiative, a capacity-building and outreach platform at the University of Wisconsin – Madison for faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions who work on environmental and climate issues. Dekila began her career working on community-based conservation in the Himalayas and went on to work on regional climate change adaptation and free flowing rivers in the Mekong region for the World Wildlife Fund. In 2008, she helped establish Khoryug, an association of over 50 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries implementing environmental projects across the Himalayas under the auspices of His Holiness the Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. In 2009, Dekila founded and led WWF Sacred Earth, a 5-year pilot program that built partnerships with faith leaders and religious institutions towards concrete conservation results in the Amazon, East Africa, Himalayas, Mekong, and the United States. She received the prestigious Yale McCluskey Award in 2014 for conservation innovation for her work and moved to the Yale School of Environmental Studies as an associate research scientist, where she researched, lectured and designed the prototype for what is now the Loka Initiative. In 2018, in partnership with many faith and Indigenous leaders as well as Dr. Richard Davidson, Dr. John Dunne, Dr. Jonathan Patz, Dr. Paul Robbins and others at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, she developed and launched the Loka Initiative with a singular vision; that inner, community, and planetary resilience are interdependent and we cannot achieve any one of these goals without working on the other two. She is originally from the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India and speaks five languages: Sikkimese, Tibetan, Nepali, Hindi and English.
Elke Weber is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and founder and director of the Behavioral Science for Policy Lab. Her research models decision-making under uncertainty and time delay in financial and environmental contexts from a psychological and neuroscience perspective. Her expertise in the behavioral decision sciences has been sought out by advisory committees of the National Academy of Sciences on Human Dimensions in Global Change, an American Psychological Association Task Force that issued a report on the Interface between Psychology and Global Climate Change, and Working Group III for the 5 th and 6 th Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She is past president of the Society for Neuroeconomics, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Society for Mathematical Psychology. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Risk Analysis, the Society for Experimental Psychology. She received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Risk Analysis. She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the US National Academy of Sciences.
