David Poeppel

David Poeppel (born 1964 in Freiburg, Germany)is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU). Since 2014, he is also the Director of the Department of Neuroscience at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA).

Poeppel received his Abitur from the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich, obtained his bachelor's degree (1990) and doctorate (1995) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. He received training in functional brain imaging as a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Medicine of the University of California, San Francisco. Before going to NYU in 2009, Poeppel directed the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory at the University of Maryland College Park, where he was a professor of linguistics and biology.

He was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and has been a guest professor at several institutions. He has received the DaimlerChrysler Berlin Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and other honors.

He is the son of Dr. Ernst Pöppel.

David Poeppel is a researcher whoemploys behavioral and cognitive neuroscience approaches to study the brain basis of auditory processing, speech perception and language comprehension.The research in Poeppel's laboratory addresses questions such as: What are the cognitive and neuronal “parts lists” that form the basis for language processing, the fundamental constituents used in speech and language? How is sensory information transformed into the abstract representations that underlie language processing? What are the neural circuits that enable language processing?

Well-known contributions of the Poeppel laboratory include: the functional anatomic model of language developed with Greg Hickok; research on lateralization in auditory processing; and experimental work on the role of neuronal oscillations in audition and speech perception. He also writes and lectures about methodological questions at the interdisciplinary boundary between cognitive science research and brain research.