Peter Lovatt, University of Hertfordshire

Peter Lovatt is a Reader in Cognitive Psychology and a Principal lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. Before starting on an academic career he was a professional dancer.

Lovatt left full time theatre to study Psychology and English at the Roehampton Institute, London, and graduated from the University of Surrey in 1993. Following this he took an MSc in Neural Computation from the Centre for Cognitive and Computational Neurosciences at the University of Stirling in 1994, and thereafter went on to do doctoral research in the department of Psychology at the University of Essex. His research into the psychology of dance has a broad and international appeal. One of his recent studies examined the dancing styles of over 13,600 people, and another examined the link between hormones and dancing ability.

Lovatt, together with Marina Wallace and Russell Maliphant, has recently been awarded a research grant by the Wellcome Trust to examine people's psychological and physiological response to dance.