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Stephan studied Media informatics at Harz University and received his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Tübingen in 2013. After he held several postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and at the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL. Since 2018, he is appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Constance. Currently, Stephan is also affiliated with the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.

Stephan is interested in the perceptual and cognitive processes underlying social interaction and collective behaviour. He is employing novel computational tools such as Virtual Reality and biometric avatars to study reciprocal social interactions under realistic and controlled experimental conditions. He is also interested in psychological questions related to social interactions such as joint action coordination, person and body perception, and the transmission of affective states across individuals. In his project at the Zukunftskolleg, Stephan will investigate how an individual’s behaviour is affected by the presence of others and how the social context influences the perception of the self. The title of his project is “Studying Collective Behavior using Virtual Reality”.

For more information about Stephan’s research projects and publications, please see here.