Prof. Dr. Soyoung Q Park is neuroscientist and psychologist. She investigates how human decisions emerge in the brain and how these can be changed, with the goal to design innovative strategy to optimize decisions and behavior. On one hand, she focuses on how our social environment shapes our decisions, on the other hand, how our body and brain interact to form decisions. She tackles diverse kind of decisions, such as decisions to trust others, what to buy and consume, investment decisions, just to mention a few. Her research has attracted much media attention, her work has been featured among others by New York Times, The Guardian, ARTE or International Business Times. She is currently the Department Head of ‘Decision Neuroscience and Nutrition’ at the German Institute for Human Nutrition and is professor at the Charité – Univeristätsmedizin Berlin.

What drives us to trust someone we just met? Did we eat spaghetti for lunch because we saw our colleague eat spaghetti? What drives a risky decision? How can our breakfast impact our decisions throughout the day? Research from different disciplines such as economics, psychology and neuroscience have attempted to investigate the motives and modulators of human decision making. Our decisions can be flexibly modulated by the different experiences we have in our daily lives. These modulations can occur through our social networks, through the impact of our own behavior on the social environment, but also simply by the food we have eaten. Here, I will present a series of recent studies from my lab in which we shed light on the psychological, neural and metabolic motives and modulators of human decision making.