Núria Sebastián received her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Barcelona in 1986. After Post-doctoral training at the Max Plank Institute and the CNRS in Paris, she was appointed Associate Professor of the Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, in 1988, and then was promoted to Full Professor in 2002. In 2009, she moved to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). She was a Visiting Scholar at several research centers including the IRCS at the University of Pennsylvania, the ICN at University College (London) and the University of Chicago. She was coordinator of the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 research consortium (BRAINGLOT). From Jan. 2014 Dec. 2016 she was Vice-President of the ERC. In 2016 she was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. She leads the SAP Research Group (Speech Acquisition and Processing) at UPF’s Center for Brain and Cognition. She has authored over 150 publications in international journals.
Research interests
The scientific contributions by Dr. Sebastián Gallés cluster around the topic of language learning in bilingual contexts. She wants to understand the mechanisms that make possible that young infants acquire a language (or languages) in a short period of time. She also wants to understand the way adult brains get to learn new languages later in life. She is a firm supported of interdisciplinarity and her research is a clear example of it, as it combines fundadmental concepts of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience. Her main goal is to understand how the human brain hosts language and how its acquisition and processing changes the brain.
Keywords
psychology, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, development