Ernst Poeppel

Who is Ernst Poeppel?

Ernst Poeppel is a German psychologist and neuroscientist who was born in 1940. He has studied psychology and biology in Freiburg and Munich, Germany, before finishing his academic education with PhD in 1968 in Innsbruck, Austria. He did research on temporal perception and circadian rhythms between 1964 and 1968 in the Max-Planck-Institute of Behavioral Physiology, and on neurophysiology of vision in 1969 and 1970 in Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry, Munich. From 1971 to 1973, he did research on neuropsychology of vision at the Department of Psychology and Brain Science at MIT, Cambridge, USA. At the same time, he was staff scientist at the Neuroscience Research Program. At this time, he described together with Richard Held and Douglas Frost a phenomenon of residual vision, which became to be known as blindsight.

After his first habilitation in Sensory Physiology in 1974 and a second one in Psychology in 1976 he became Professor of Medical Psychology in 1976 at the Medical Faculty of Munich University, Germany. In 1977 he founded the Institute for Medical Psychology, and he became its director, a position he held until 2008. From 1992 to 1997 he had leave of absence from Munich University, when he was board member of the national Research Center Juelich, where he was responsible for the Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences, and Mathematical Modeling.