Nuria Sebastian Galles

Nuria Sebastian Galles is a Full Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), affiliated with the Department of Engineering and the UPF Center of Studies in Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Her career includes roles as Associate Professor (University of Barcelona, 1988-2002) and Full Professor (since 2002). She leads the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) Research Group and coordinates major projects such as the BRAINGLOT consortium on bilingualism and cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Galles has received notable awards including the James S. McDonnell Foundation Award and ICREA Academia Prize, and served on the European Research Council Scientific Council. Her research focuses on cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, and infant language development, leveraging EEG, brain imaging, and behavioral studies.

Education: PhD in Experimental Psychology (University of Barcelona, 1986), postdoctoral training at Max Planck Institute and LSCP-CNRS (Paris). Visiting scholarships include University of Pennsylvania, University College London, and University of Chicago.

Research Interests: Bilingualism's impact on cognition, neurobiological foundations of language acquisition, infant speech perception, and social cognition. Current projects include ERC-funded studies on attention-language links and cognitive effects of walnut consumption in adolescents.

Publications: Over 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals like Science, PNAS, and Developmental Science, with a focus on bilingualism, phonetic categorization, and social hierarchy processing in infants. Editor of Developmental Science and Language Learning and Development.

Grants & Teams: ERC Advanced Grant (Under Control), Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (BRAINGLOT). Lab collaborations include multi-country studies on traffic pollution’s cognitive impact and walnut-based dietary interventions.