Emily Cross is a dancer and cognitive neuroscientist based in Zürich, Switzerland. She directs the Social Brain Sciences Lab at ETH Zürich, where she investigates how embodied experience shapes social perception and learning. Her research integrates intensive learning paradigms with brain imaging to understand experience-dependent plasticity, with particular focus on the neural signatures of embodied expertise in dancers, the neurocognitive foundations of visual learning across the lifespan, neuroaesthetics of performing arts, and human social engagement with robots. Cross's work has been recognized with the British Science Association's Jacob Brownowski Award for contributions to arts and sciences (2017), the UK's Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), and she was named one of the World's 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics by Insight Analytics (2020). She is an elected member of the Young Academy of Europe and the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Young Academy of Scotland, and serves on UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Australian Research Council, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the European Research Council. Cross holds a BA in psychology and dance from Pomona College, an MSc in cognitive psychology from the University of Otago as a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Dartmouth College. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of Nottingham and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. She has previously held faculty positions at Radboud University Nijmegen, Bangor University, University of Glasgow, and Macquarie and Western Sydney Universities.
