Dr Franca Parianen-Lesemann – Keynote Speaker

Franca Parianen is a neuroscientist, successful science slammer and bestselling author. Her books and lectures focus on the big questions of coexistence, which she explores on the level of brain and hormones.

After graduating from high school in Osnabrück, Franca Parianen (*1989) completed her double bachelor’s degree in Arts and Science in Public Administration at WWU Münster and the University of Twente. Her minor in Social Entrepreneurship leads her to the topic of ‘fair trade’. She works as a fundraising coordinator at ‘Eine Welt Netz NRW’ and visits social companies in Mauritius as part of a field study.

Today, she discovers social issues primarily from a neuroscientific perspective. From 2012 to 2014 she completed her Research Master in Neuroscience and Cognition at the University of Utrecht and her doctorate in September 2019. Meanwhile, she is researching compassion, the theory of mind and the neuroscientific foundations of economic decisions as well as neuroplasticity. She did internships at the Jacobs Center for Lifelong Learning in Bremen, or in collaboration with Oxford University, and worked as a research assistant at the Helmholtz Institute of the University of Utrecht and the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences in Leipzig. In Utrecht and Leipzig, she laid the foundations for her doctorate on the question of how stress, power and (early childhood) attachment shape our plastic hormonal system and thus our social competence.

Since 2014, Dr. Franca Parianen has been on stage as a science slammer. She slammed her research results in pubs, theatres and at congresses, looks at the origins and structure of human coexistence in a knowledgeable and rapid way, and thus reached the finals of the German championships as well as the Ideenexpo. In 2017 she won the Neuro-Slam of the German Society of Neurology.

As a keynote speaker, Franca Parianen also offers fascinating insights into the neurosciences, examines the basics of human coexistence, shows what shapes our behaviour and transfers her findings on social driving forces and communication to daily politics and the digital world. She impresses with her humorous and entertaining way of presenting her highly complex research.