Sarah Meissner

Curriculum Vitae

Sarah Meissner, a psychologist by training, is an SNSF Assistant Professor at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zürich, where she is the head of the Brain-Body-Regulation Lab.

Sarah was born in Germany in 1988 and received her BSc (in 2011) and MSc in Psychology (in 2014) from the University of Konstanz, Germany. During her studies, she deepened her interest in Neuroscience during an internship at the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Children’s Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. Following her studies, Sarah completed her PhD in 2017 at the Institute of Clinical Neuroscience and Medical Psychology at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany, where she investigated motor learning and its underlying oscillatory dynamics in Parkinson’s disease and healthy aging using magnetoencephalography (MEG). In 2018, she joined the Neural Control of Movement Lab at ETH. Here, her postdoctoral research on arousal self-regulation through pupil-based biofeedback was supported by the SNSF Spark Grant and an ETH Career Seed Award.

In 2024, she was awarded an SNSF Starting Grant allowing her to start her own research group, the Brain-Body Regulation Lab, at ETH Zürich. The lab’s research explores fundamental human brain functions, their modulation, and their interaction with other bodily signals. We focus particularly on brain arousal levels, a core aspect of human physiology that shapes perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior. We seek to understand the mechanisms of arousal control in humans and how these processes may become dysregulated in the context of mental health disorders using different neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and physiological recordings. At the core of our work are innovative biofeedback techniques as experimental tools to tap into neuromodulatory, arousal-regulating brain regions. Beyond advancing basic science, these approaches may hold promise for clinical applications.

Beyond academia, Sarah is a Scientific Advisor to the ETH spin-off MindMetrix and is committed to translate her lab’s work for broad audiences, such as at the BrainFair, Science City, or Scientifica.