Pascal Vrticka

Dr Pascal Vrticka (PhD, FHEA) is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Brain Science, Department of Psychology, University of Essex (Colchester, UK), where he leads the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt) Lab. His work asks a question that matters well beyond the laboratory: what actually happens in our brains and bodies when we connect with the people we depend on and care for, and what does it cost us when those connections are strained or fail?

Using brain imaging techniques that record two or more people's brain activity simultaneously while they interact, his SoNeAt Lab studies how parents and children, romantic partners, and more recently leaders and their teams, get "in sync" and regulate one another in real time.

He is Scientific Secretary and a member of the Executive Board of the Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies (SEAS), and Coordinating Board President of its Special Interest Research Group on the social neuroscience of human attachment (SIRG SoNeAt).

Trained in biochemistry and neurobiology at ETH Zurich (Switzerland), he completed his PhD in social neuroscience at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva (Switzerland), before research positions at Stanford School of Medicine (California, USA) and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig (Germany).

He currently leads the TRIO and SWITCH studies on interpersonal synchrony, the latter part of a €1.5 million international project spanning five universities in four European countries, alongside the LEAD study on leader-follower relationships. The work as part of LEAD underpins his attachment-informed leadership (AIL) framework, which proposes that leadership is best understood not as a set of styles but as an attachment relationship, and that a leader's central task is to become a reliable source of security for the people they lead.

Dr Vrticka speaks regularly to audiences both inside and outside academia. He gave a TEDx talk at the University of Essex in 2022, Caring Dads: The Making of Involved and Confident Fathers, on why fathers matter and what changes in men's brains when they become parents. He has also delivered many in-person and remote lectures, invited talks, and keynotes around the world, including in Europe (Switzerland, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Croatia and others), as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, China and South Korea, and convenes annual international methods workshops at Essex.

As Associate Trustee of the UK charity Babygro, he also co-produced a free illustrated book for parents now used in workshops and professional training programmes, including in Taiwan. He writes for general audiences through The Conversation, his Attachment Insights series, and his Substack publications on attachment science and attachment-informed leadership.

Suggested speaking topics:

• Why we need each other, and what it costs when we cannot rely on others
  For any audience
• Attachment-informed leadership (AIL): the leader as a regulatory resource
  For executive teams, HR and leadership development, NHS boards, school leadership
• What babies' brains need, and what parents need to hear
  For early years, health visiting, midwifery, family charities, employer parent networks
• Fathers are made, not born
  For employers, perinatal and family services, policy audiences, fatherhood organisations
• The relationship is the intervention
  For schools, multi-academy trusts, teacher training, social care, healthcare providers
• What we got wrong about the brain, and what replaces it
  For CPD providers, therapy and counselling organisations, trauma-informed practice programmes, general audiences
• Masterclass: the evidence audit
  For organisations that have invested in staff training and want to know whether it is defensible