Olaf Blanke MD, PhD

He is the Founding Director of the Center for Neuroprosthetics and holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – EPFL (Switzerland). He also directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute of EPFL and serves as Professor of Neurology at the University Hospital of Geneva (Switzerland). Additionally, he is a Co-founder of Metaphysiks Engineering and a member of the board of Mindmaze. He has made major contributions to the neuroscience of multisensory perception, embodiment, out-of-body experiences, and self-consciousness. He has been at the forefront of integrating robotics and virtual reality technology into neuroscience of consciousness studies and cognitive psychology.

He studied Medicine at the University of Münster (Germany), Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), and Sorbonne University (Paris), and carried out his doctoral work in Neurophysiology at the University of Berlin (Germany). He subsequently joined the presurgical epilepsy unit at the University Hospital of Geneva as a Postdoctoral Researcher and completed his Medical Residency in the neurology department of the same institution.