Katja Wiech studied psychology at the Universities of Kiel and Düsseldorf (Germany). She completed her PhD in Tübingen (Germany) under the supervision of Prof. Niels Birbaumer before joining the research group of Prof. Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London (UK). During this time, she gained expertise in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate cognitive-affective modulators of pain perception and neural processing. She then joined the Pain Imaging Neuroscience Group at the University of Oxford (led by Prof. Irene Tracey) where she continued her research on the psychological aspects of pain. Katja received a New Investigator Grant from the Medical Research Council (MRC), UK which allowed her to establish her own group at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford and the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN).

Katja’s current research focuses on the influence of beliefs on the perception and neural processing of pain and aims to characterise the processes that integrate beliefs with incoming sensory information and the failure of optimal integration in biased perception. Her research uses a multi-method approach combining different non-invasive neuroimaging techniques including functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging with behavioural and autonomic measures.