Marco Iacoboni
Marco Iacoboni, MD PhD, studied medicine, neurology, and neuroscience at the University La Sapienza in Rome, Italy. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1999. He is Director of the Neuromodulation Lab at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, member of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and member of the Brain Research Institute.
Dr. Iacoboni investigates neural systems and functional mechanisms of social cognition in health and disease, which is how we perceive, think and make decisions about other people. Using brain imaging and non-invasive brain stimulation, Dr. Iacoboni pioneered research on imitation, emotional contagion and empathy and their cognitive control mechanisms.
Dr. Iacoboni’s work, funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, has been covered by the New York Times (front page), Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, The Economist, and major TV networks. Dr. Iacoboni describes this work in a book for general readers titled Mirroring People, published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (hard cover) and Picador (paperback), and translated in thirteen languages. Recently, he has been investigating how to modulate implicit bias to reduce group prejudice, using brain imaging, brain stimulation, and virtual reality. As part of his leadership activities in the newly established UCLA-CDU Center for Neuroscience and Society, which promotes a community partnered neuroscience, Dr. Iacoboni is Co-Director of the Research and Training Core.