Prof. Ewelina Knapska
Ewelina Knapska was born in 1977. She graduated from the Faculty of Biology (2001) and the Faculty of Psychology (2004) at the University of Warsaw. Ewelina Knapska earned her doctorate in 2006 at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where she studied the functional organization of the amygdala in the brain and the social communication of emotions in rats. Ewelina Knapska completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan (USA), working on the neural basis of fear extinction.
In 2013, she secured her habilitation at the Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 2012, she has headed the Laboratory of Emotions Neurobiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology. Prof. Knapska is a co-founder, together with Prof. Leszek Kaczmarek, of BRAINCITY – Centre of Excellence for Neural Plasticity and Brain Disorders, established thanks to the International Research Agendas Programme of the Foundation for Polish Science and financed by European funds.
Prof. Knapska's research combines neurophysiology, behaviorism, and modern methods of imaging neuronal activity. Their aim is to understand how the brain recognizes and processes emotion-related information in a social context. The researcher was one of the first in the world to describe the phenomenon of “emotional empathy” in laboratory animals and to show that specific areas of the amygdala are responsible for this phenomenon.
Prof. Knapska also created the innovative Eco-HAB system, which faithfully recreates the natural environment of mice and automatically tracks interactions between them and their social behaviors. This innovative tool has been patented and is used in research on the autism spectrum and social phobias.
Prof. Knapska is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Advisory Board of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). She is a member of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence and the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives (DABI). She was President of the European Brain and Behaviour Society (EBBS) and Vice-President of the Polish Society for Nervous System Research.
Prof. Knapska is the author of more than 60 scientific publications, cited more than 3,300 times by other scholars. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and prizes, including the Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) (2016-2022), the Prime Minister's Award for her doctoral dissertation (2014), the Kolumb fellowship (2006), the HOMING programme of the Foundation for Polish Science (2008), and the Burgen Scholarship awarded by Academia Europaea (2013).
Prof. Knapska's research opens up new horizons in the neuroscience of emotions, a field that attempts to answer questions about how our brain understands and reacts to the emotions of others and how various brain disorders and diseases affect the transmission of emotions.
We have all experienced a moment when someone's laughter was so infectious that it was impossible not to smile, or when the sight of another person's suffering evoked our compassion. This phenomenon, known as “emotional contagion,” is the simplest form of empathy.
Prof. Knapska was one of the first in the world to discover that the amygdala – a small, deeply hidden part of the brain responsible for emotions – contains specialized groups of nerve cells (neurons) that are responsible for transmitting emotions between individuals. These emotions can be both positive, like the feeling of joy or reward, and negative, for example, fear or stress. This groundbreaking discovery demonstrates that the brain responds to the emotions of others in a way that is firmly rooted biologically, and most importantly, organized rather than random.
Prof. Knapska and her team use modern techniques in their research to enable, among other things, tracking the activity of individual neurons in response to social stimuli. One of Prof. Knapska’s most innovative tools is the Eco-HAB system. It is a kind of “mouse city,” where animals live in seminatural conditions, and special chips automatically track their movements. This solution allows researchers to observe the daily interactions of the animals, without stressing them, in conditions resembling the natural environment, which ensures objectivity, reliability, and repeatability of results. Eco-HAB has allowed the researchers to establish that mice can spontaneously form social networks and that the scent of an animal in which the brain's reward system has been activated affects the behavior of other individuals.
What is more, Prof. Knapska's team has shown that rodents recognize when an animal in their group is experiencing fear or excitement, and that mice can learn by observing the emotions of other individuals, a process that depends on the animal's sex and social situation.
Prof. Knapska's research has brought a new perspective to understanding the origins of empathy. Previously, scholars believed that the ability to recognize the emotions of others evolved mainly in the context of parental care. However, the findings of Prof. Knapska's team suggest that parental care might not be the main driving force behind the development of such behavior, as warning about potential danger can just as well be the driver. Importantly, the transmission of emotions can occur not only between individuals of the same species but also between different species, which indicates that this process has an important informational function, namely it contributes to survival by warning of danger.
Prof. Knapska and her team also discovered that a key component of processes occurring in the amygdala is the enzyme MMP-9, a protein that affects the ability of neurons to form and modify connections between them. When the normal activity of this enzyme is restored in mice with depression-like symptoms, their ability to learn that is motivated by reward returns. This finding may be significant for the development of new therapies for motivational disorders such as depression.
Prof. Knapska’s research demonstrates that emotions are not only subjective experiences but also a language through which we communicate with others, and which our brain reads with remarkable precision. The discovery of the neuronal mechanisms of emotion transmission allows us to understand the nature of empathy and opens up new avenues of research into the treatment of emotional disorders that make it difficult for people to connect and build relationships with others.
