Tor Wager is Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience at Dartmouth College and director of Dartmouth’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center and the Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. His research centers on the neurophysiology of affective processes—pain, emotion, stress, and empathy—and how they are shaped by cognitive and social influences.
One of Wager’s focus areas is the impact of thoughts and beliefs on learning, brain function and brain-body communication. He also studies the development of brain biomarkers that track and predict affective experience, including pain and other clinical symptoms. A third focus is statistical, machine learning, and computational techniques that provide a foundation for new models of the affective brain. Wager’s lab conducts basic research in these focus areas and applies the resulting techniques and models to collaborative, translational research on clinical disorders and interventions. In support of these goals, Wager and his group have developed several publicly available software toolboxes. He also teaches courses and workshops on functional MRI analysis and has co-authored a book, “Principles of fMRI.”
