Dr. Emily Cross
Professor & Principal Investigator, ETH Zurich
Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute (Germany)
PhD, Darthmouth College
From a young age, Dr. Emily Cross was drawn to the arts—dance, music, theater—and it was this appreciation for the aesthetic that first inspired her love for science. In high school, Emily took advanced biology and an introductory psychology class in the same semester. The classes’ syllabi overlapped such that she was learning about the cellular and molecular aspects of neurobiology in one class while being introduced to cognitive implications of this biology in the other. She was struck with the realization that “…constellations of neurons are responsible for music, for art, for joy, for love, for grief, for everything.” This epiphany ultimately led her to a life in science motivated by a deep appreciation for the depth of human experience. Today, she leads the Social Brain Sciences Lab at ETH Zurich. One branch of her lab studies how humans learn via observation and derive aesthetic pleasure from the arts, while another branch focuses on how they socially engage with robots.
Despite her blossoming interest in the brain during high school, Emily entered Pomona College as a theater major and devoted much of her free time to dance. Although she dabbled in neuro-related classes outside her major requirements and even started working in a neuropsych lab, she did not see science as a future career. As the years progressed, however, Emily began to recognize that she was more passionate about her two side gigs—dance and neuroscience—than she was about theater. One driving aspect of her increasing interest in the brain was her experience in the lab. She was in awe of her PI, Dr. Deborah Burke, a smart and successful scientist, strong leader, mother, and fierce defender of women in science. She was also endlessly impressed by the graduate students in the lab. However, despite no shortage of role models, Emily still could not envision becoming a PI herself someday; she didn’t think she could cut it. She did, however, decide to drop the theater major and instead double majored in psychology and dance.
After graduating, Emily earned a Fulbright Scholarship to do a master’s in cognitive science in New Zealand, where she also joined a contemporary hip hop dance company. The Fulbright gave her a kernel of external validation, and with more lab experience, Emily’s confidence grew. She began to feel as if a PhD was no longer out of reach for her. Returning to the U.S., she started a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College. Inspired by her continued devotion to dance, Emily was interested in how the brain controls body movement, and she joined Dr. Scott Grafton’s lab, which focused on motor control. As her central thesis project, Emily investigated how motor experience changes the brain’s representation of certain objects. Specifically, she taught human participants to name or tie certain knots and then used fMRI to measure brain activity while participants performed a discrimination task with the same knots. One of her findings was that the anterior intraparietal sulcus, a brain region involved in object manipulation, was active when people viewed knots they had been trained to tie, supporting the theory of overlap in brain circuits concerning the conceptual knowledge of an object and how it can be physically manipulated.
In addition to this main project, Emily embarked on a few side projects that were close to her heart. The first came about serendipitously. She was chatting with her advisor about the new choreography she was learning with her dance company, explaining how incredibly intricate and difficult it was for the whole company. Her advisor said off-handedly, “Do a study on it!” Emily was amazed at the possibility, and she jumped at the opportunity. In her first study on dance, she performed fMRI on fellow performers at her dance company over the course of 5 weeks as they learned the choreography of a new dance. During the fMRI sessions, the participants observed and imagined performing a set of dance moves, some from the choreography they were learning, and some unpracticed sequences. Emily found not only that classic motor areas were activated as the dancers imagined performing the trained sequences, but also that this activation increased over the course of their training. The better the dancers were able to perform individual dance movements, the more ventral premotor cortex and inferior parietal lobule were engaged. Emily and her supervisor likened this to a neural signature of embodiment. Emily went on to do a couple more studies on dance as well as one on contortionists as side projects during her PhD.
As Emily considered a postdoc, she knew that she wanted to continue using fMRI to study the brain regions linking action and perception. At the time, there weren’t many other labs in the US doing this type of work, and she landed at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany. By this time, the field of neuroaesthetics—the neurobiology underlying the perception of art, beauty, and design—was expanding and beginning to welcome perspectives from the performing arts, including dance. In her postdoctoral work, she used fMRI to observe brain activity while participants (non-dancers) observed clips of professional dancers performing different moves. The participants also rated how much they liked each move and how difficult they thought it would be to perform. Emily found that activation of certain parts of the action observation network (AON), a group of sensorimotor brain regions engaged when we observe others’ actions, correlated with how much the participants liked each move, as well as with the perceived difficulty. These data begin to explain how embodiment of observed physical movement contributes to aesthetic experience while watching dance. Additionally, Emily made a discovery that challenged then-current assumptions that the AON is biased towards familiar movements in a person’s motor repertoire. Instead, she found that certain parts of the AON were more highly activated when participants observed a human or robot making rigid, robotic movements compared to natural human movements, suggesting some nodes of the AON are engaged by novel, unfamiliar motion. This work would heavily influence a branch of her future independent lab.
Emily loved the environment at Max Planck, both in terms of the knowledgeable, interesting colleagues and the incredible resources. Thus it was bittersweet when, only a couple years into her postdoc, she was contacted by Radboud University in the Netherlands recruiting her for a faculty position. After interviewing and receiving the official offer, she felt she had to cut her postdoc short and take the opportunity. A few years later, her lab moved from the Netherlands to Bangor University in Wales, where she spent the longest stretch of her early career. It was while at Bangor that she applied for a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant. She knew that successful ERC applications focused on bold, innovative, ambitious ideas. Remembering her previous work on robotic movements, she decided to propose delving deeper into human perception of robots: When are robots seen or not seen as social agents? What most strongly influences how people perceive robots—what the robots look like, what experimenters tell them about the robots, or their prior beliefs about robots? The project was funded, allowing her lab size to double and breaking open a totally new “palace of research”. Emily began spending more time engaging with engineering and computer science literature as her work became more interdisciplinary.
Today, Emily’s lab is at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, but there were a few locations in between. After Bangor, she spent time at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and then at Macquarie University in Australia. Some of these moves were for professional and others for personal reasons. For instance, when she was in Glasgow, she and her husband were working at universities a 6-hour drive apart. When they had their first child, this no longer became a viable situation, and they found positions together in Australia. Now, in Zurich, Emily feels she’s finally found the “goldilocks” location for her lab and family. But while many people would have lamented moving frequently, Emily loved it and feels privileged to have lived in so many places and experienced so many cultures, both generally and in terms of scientific and academic atmospheres.
At ETH Zurich, Emily is a Professor of Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and heads the Social Brain Sciences Lab. Her lab continues to work across multiple disciplines to understand how embodied experiences influence how people perceive and learn from others (whether human or artificial). Given her expertise on how humans interact with technologies like robots, she was tapped by UNESCO to serve on their International Bioethics Committee. In this capacity, she has worked on two major reports, one on the ethical issues of neurotechnologies and the other on how the digitization of childhood is affecting mental health and development. She has found this work incredibly interesting, and it has led her to think more deeply about the ethical implications of some of the technologies she herself studies. She’s committed to training the next generation of scientists to think critically not only about their science, but also about how the work affects humanity. However, perhaps the greatest lesson Emily provides for her trainees is one of example: she is living proof that following your passions can lead you to incredible new places, both physically and intellectually.
Find out more about Emily and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with emily on May 23, 2025 below!
