Stories of Women in Neuroscience · Stories of WiN

Dr. Emily Cross

·46 min·3 clips

Her most cited dance paper pointed to “a neural signature of embodiment” in left inferior parietal and premotor cortex.

1. Stories of Women in Neuroscience features Dr. Emily Cross, whose work at UTH Zurich spans human neuroscience, arts, and social robotics. 2. Margarita interviews Emily Cross because she is a professor and principal investigator at UTH Zurich in Switzerland, leading the Social Brain Sciences Lab. 3. The episode asks how theater, dance, psychology, and neuroscience became one research career and how that career moved into robotics. 4. Cross says high school biology and psychology classes first made her think about “every feeling, every thought” as brain biology and electrochemical impulses. 5. She explains that she began a bachelor’s degree in theater, kept dancing, and later changed her major three years into a four-year degree to pursue neuroscience and psychology. 6. Her master’s work was in cognitive psychology, and she was dancing in a professional hip hop contemporary company at the same time. 7. During her PhD, she worked in a motor control lab on motor learning and brain responses to new experience, while also dancing in a contemporary company. 8. A neurologist supervisor told her to “do a study on it” after hearing that her dance company was learning difficult new choreography. 9. That suggestion led to a brain imaging study of dance-company members learning a complex full-body movement repertoire. 10. She later used dance as a model system for multisensory integration, complex motor learning, whole-body action coordination, and neuroaesthetics. 11. Cross says her first dance study suggested a “neural signature of embodiment” in the left inferior parietal and premotor cortex. 12. She also says the same PhD period included studies on knot tying and contortionists, which tied back to action-perception links. 13. On research careers, she recalls seeing PhD students who seemed brilliant and relentless, while she initially thought the path might be beyond her. 14. She says a Fulbright fellowship for her master’s in New Zealand gave her an early sense that she might contribute to research. 15. Cross describes moving to Europe for a short postdoc at the University of Nottingham and then to the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig. 16. She says her postdoc environment felt like “being in a candy shop,” and later she was surprised when a colleague dismissed her Germany postdoc as giving up her career. 17. Her robotics line began with social and non-social control conditions using rigid robotic movements, then expanded after an ERC grant idea in 2014. 18. She says the grant let her build a much larger lab and buy robots, while her team culture relied on repeated moves, lab manuals, retreats, and shared social practices like river swimming near ETH Zurich. 19. Listeners interested in women in science, dance research, and social robotics will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for a tightly technical methods interview without career history may skip it.

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