Katja Wiech studied Psychology at the Universities of Kiel and Düsseldorf (Germany) where she graduated in 1997. She completed her PhD in Tübingen (Germany) under the supervision of Prof. Niels Birbaumer on the topic of cortical reorganization in phantom limb pain patients. For her first post-doc position she joined the 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 the perception and neural processing of pain. She subsequently became a member of the Pain Imaging Neuroscience Group at the University of Oxford (headed by Prof. Irene Tracey) where she continued her research on psychological aspects of pain. Dr Wiech received a New Investigator grant from the Medical Research Council (MRC), UK that allowed her to establish her own group at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (WIN) at the University of Oxford.

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