Emilie Caspar is a professor at Ghent University, Belgium, where she leads the Moral and Social Brain Lab. She specialises in social and cognitive neuroscience, striving to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying moral and immoral decision-making.

Her main research areas focus on obedience and how restricting one’s autonomy and choice options impacts the brain. She works with various populations worldwide, including former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda and Cambodia, as well as inmates and military personnel. She has received numerous awards for her research, notably the prestigious ERC Starting Grant and the Early Career Award for Human Research from the Society for Social Neuroscience. She recently published a trade book that explores how obeying orders affects the brain, integrating her findings with testimonies from perpetrators. She also collaborates with several NGOs globally to provide science-based tools that could assist citizens in resisting undue inducement.