P E R S O N A L
DECISION NEUROSCIENCE

P E R S O N A L
ABOUT ME
Alan Sanfey is Professor and Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He also currently serves as Director of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging as well as Director of the Radboud Centre for Decision Science. Previously he held positions as Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, and as a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. and Masters Degree in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Colorado, and an undergraduate honors degree in Psychology from University College Dublin, Ireland.

He currently heads the Decision Neuroscience group at the Donders Institute, and his research utilizes a novel approach to the study of both individual and interactive decision-making by combining the methods of behavioral experiments, functional neuroimaging, and formal economic models. Examining sophisticated high-level behavior at a neural level, such as deciding on how much risk to take with an investment or deciding on a strategy when playing a competitive game with an opponent, can provide important clues as to the fundamental mechanisms by which decision-making operates.
A further goal of his group is to use the knowledge gleaned from these studies to inform public policy debates, for example in understanding how expectations play a role in financial, environmental and health-care decisions, and has founded the Radboud Centre for Decision Science to advance these goals. He has published his work extensively in leading international journals across several fields (Psychology, Neuroscience, Economics and Business). His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Dutch Science Foundation, and the European Research Council.
He is native of Dublin, Ireland, and when not in the lab enjoys travelling and outdoor pursuits such as football, running, biking (living in the Netherlands is a good place for these), as well as hiking, skiing and mountaineering (however not so good for these - though the mountains aren’t too far away).

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