Christian Büchel is a member of the Hamburg Center for Neuroscience in Hamburg, where he is also the Director of the Department for Systems Neuroscience at Hamburg University Medical Center. He holds an Affiliate Professor appointment in the Psychology department at the University of Hamburg. He performed postdoctoral research with Karl Friston as a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at UCL in London with a focus on effective connectivity.
Establishing his lab in Hamburg, he focused on pain and motivation. He observed that pain modulation underlying placebo analgesia can already be observed at the spinal cord level. A finding which he later also established for nocebo hyperalgesia.
He was awarded the Jung Award for Medicine, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis by the German Research Foundation, and the Wiley Young Investigator Award of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping for recognition of his work in cognitive neuroscience.