Simon Fisher

Simon E. Fisher is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of Language and Genetics at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He obtained a Natural Sciences degree at Cambridge University, UK, followed by a doctorate in Human Genetics at Oxford University, UK. For his postdoctoral research Simon joined Prof. Anthony Monaco's group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG) in Oxford, where he worked on genetic analyses of human neurodevelopmental disorders, and isolated the first case of a gene implicated in speech and language deficits. In 2002, Simon was awarded with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and became head of his own laboratory at the WTCHG, using state-of-the-art methods to uncover how language-related genes influence the brain. From 2007-2010, he was also the Isobel Laing Fellow in Biomedical Sciences at Oriel College, Oxford University, teaching Biochemistry and Medical Genetics to undergraduate students. In 2010 Simon was appointed a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and became director of the Nijmegen MPI, heading a new department devoted to understanding the functional links between genetics and language. Simon’s work involves extensive supervision of post-doctoral scientists, research assistants and students, and interdisciplinary collaborations worldwide. He is author of 12 book chapters and >149 journal articles, including original research in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Current Biology, PNAS, Nature Communications, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Genetics, and Molecular Psychiatry, and high impact reviews in Nature Reviews Genetics/Neuroscience, Annual Review of Genetics/Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Sciences/Genetics and Current Opinion in Neurobiology. According to Google Scholar, Simon’s publications have been cited >17,000 times and his h-index is 60. He has given >130 invited talks at departmental colloquia and international conferences. Awards include the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (2008) and the Eric Kandel Young Neuroscientists Prize (2009). Simon’s research adopts a multidisciplinary viewpoint, integrating data from genomics, psychology, neuroscience, developmental biology and evolutionary anthropology.