Charlotte Martial

Charlotte Martial is a neuroscientist at the Coma Science Group (GIGA-Consciousness, University of Liège, Belgium), leading the projects on the phenomenon of near-death experience. More generally, Charlotte studies conditions in which people are outwardly unresponsive such as during general anesthesia or cardiac arrest, but ‘disconnected’ or ‘connected’ to the world, as testified by the detailed subjective reports upon awakening. In recent years, she has work more extensively on the comparison between (a)typical psychedelic experiences and near-death experiences, suggesting that the former may model the latter in laboratory settings. To broaden her exploration of human consciousness, she has delved into a comprehensive spectrum of physiological (e.g., hypnosis, cognitive trance), pathological (e.g., disorder of consciousness), and pharmacological (e.g., anesthesia) conditions, demonstrating that unresponsiveness cannot be considered as a surrogate of unconsciousness employing state-of-the-art multimodal functional neuroimaging techniques. Her research is embedded within a unique intellectual framework beyond the classical disciplinary perspectives in science and medicine.

She has published more than 75 papers in international peer-reviewed journals such as Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Critical Care, Sciences Advances and NeuroImage, and several book chapters. Her contributions have been recognized with awards such as the prestigious International Brain Injury Association (IBIA) Young Investigator Award. She has been invited in numerous international conferences as a (keynote) speaker and moderator, and has served on scientific organizing committees of several conferences such as at the New York Academy of Sciences. She has been Guest Associate Editor for special issues for peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. Currently, she supervises several PhD students, with a long-term aim of advancing the understanding of near-death experience, while promoting education and public awareness about this captivating clinical and research field.