Thomas Elbert studied psychology, mathematics and physics at the Universities of Munich and Tübingen. He received his Ph.D. in Tübingen in 1978 and taught there until 1989 with intermittent visiting professorships at Pennsylvania State University and Stanford University. He then became head of a clinical research group in the field of neuroscience at the Medical Faculty of the University of Münster.

Since 1995 he has been Professor of Clinical Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Konstanz. Together with Dres. Frank Neuner and Maggie Schauer developed narrative exposure therapy (NET) in order to treat traumatic stress symptoms; NET has also been successfully tested in field studies in crisis regions in Africa and Asia. Elbert’s studies on the “psychobiology of human readiness for violence and killing” have been funded since 2010 by the German research foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) as a Reinhart Koselleck project and since 2013 by an ERC advanced grant.

Professor Elbert is a Hector fellow, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and holds honorary professorships at the Université Lumiére in Burundi and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda.