New ERC vice-president appointed

Núria Sebastián Gallés has been a member of the ERC Scientific Council since April 2013 and is also Professor in Psychology at the Department of Technology of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.
As of January 2014, there will be three ERC Vice-Presidents instead of two, who will support the President and serve as Vice-Chairs of the Scientific Council; each one of them will also be in charge of one of the ERC’s three domains. Prof. Pavel Exner will be responsible for Physical and Engineering Sciences (PE), Prof. Carl-Henrik Heldin for Life Sciences (LS), and Prof. Núria Sebastián Gallés for the Social sciences and Humanities (SH) domain.
This arrangement with three Vice-Presidents instead of two was recommended by the ERC Task Force in July 2011, to help clarify and strengthen the governance of the ERC. The Task Force built on the recommendations of the independent Review of the ERC carried out in July 2009.
The Vice-Presidents are also members of the ERC Board, together with the President and the Director of the ERC Executive Agency, which oversees the implementation of the ERC strategy and work programme prepared by the Scientific Council.
Professors Pavel Exner and Carl-Henrik Heldin were elected in April 2011 and their mandate will conclude at the end of this year.


Biography of Prof. Núria Sebastián Gallés

Núria Sebastián Gallés received her PhD in Experimental Psychology at 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 at the Faculty of Psychology (University of Barcelona) in 1988, where she was promoted to Full Professor in 2002. In 2009, she moved to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has been a Visiting Scholar at several research centres, including the IRCS at the University of Pennsylvania, the ICN at the University College (London) and at the University of Chicago. She has received international recognition as shown by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Award (“Bridging Mind, Brain and Behavior” Program) in 2001 and by giving the prestigious Nijmegen Lectures in 2005. In 2009, she was also awarded the ICREA Academia Prize established by the Catalan Government. In 2012 she received the Narcis Monturiol Medal in recognition of her scientific contributions. She was a member of the advisory group of the 'Brain and Learning' initiative of the OECD from 2002 to 2006. Until December 2012 she was president of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology. She is the coordinator of a Consolider-Ingenio 2010 research consortium investigating Bilingualism and Cognitive Neuroscience (BRAINGLOT), integrating six interdisciplinary research groups (including linguists, psychologists, physicists etc). She is currently Associate Editor of Developmental Science, Editor of the Language Learning Cognitive Neuroscience Series and member of numerous editorial boards including Bilingualism, Language and Cognition and Language Learning and Development. At the Center for Brain and Cogniton (UPF), she leads the SAP Research Group (Speech Acquisition and Processing). Her current work focuses on the study of learning and language processing with a special emphasis on bilingual populations. Research in her laboratory extends from infants to adults with methodologies that are based on behavioural as well as physiological and brain imaging responses.