New ICREAs

ICREA is an expanding community. Each year, new research professors join ICREA after the ICREA senior call. This is a list of the most recent incorporations. We would like give them all a very warm welcome to the ICREA community: Benvinguts!

Gemma Boleda

Engineering Sciences
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1 Dec, 2019
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Dr. Boleda is a computational linguist. Her aim is to understand how language works, and in particular, how words convey meaning. If you say to your friend "Your brother just came", she will immediately know who you are talking about; this ability to link language to the world is one of the defining traits of humankind, and it is far from clear how it works. Dr. Boleda addresses this research question from a cross- and interdisciplinary perspective rooted in Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science.

Carlos Pérez García-Pando

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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1 Dec, 2019
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I am interested on understanding atmospheric aerosols and traces gases, from the physical and chemical processes affecting them, to their effects upon weather, climate, ocean biogeochemistry, air quality and health. My research group develops improved representations of pollutants within atmospheric and climate models to characterize their sources, sinks, atmospheric lifecycles and effects. I am known for my work on dust aerosols; in that context, I hold an AXA Chair that tackles both fundamental and applied research questions related to dust and I lead an ERC Consolidator Grant that investigates the role of the dust mineralogical composition in the climate effects of dust based on theory, experimental campaigns, remote spectroscopy and modeling.

Thomas Surrey

Life & Medical Sciences
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1 Nov, 2019
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Thomas is a biochemist who is interested in understanding intracellular self-organization processes. Specifically, his lab studies the microtubule cytoskeleton which is particularly important during cell division when it builds the mitotic spindle that separates the genomic material of the cell. Thomas is mostly known for developing microscopy-based in vitro reconstitution approaches in which sub-systems of the cytoskeleton are re-built outside of cells from purified proteins, revealing basic mechanisms underlying dynamic cytoskeleton behaviour. 

Martina Wiltschko

Humanities
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1 Jul, 2019
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I explore the foundations that underlie the grammars of human languages. I am particularly interested in the grammatical properties of interactional language having observed that when we have conversations our use of language has characteristics that differ in interesting ways from those of sentences in isolation. Just as there is a systematic logic to the way sentences are constructed, there is also a systematic logic to the way utterances are constructed in interaction. Speakers have very clear intuitions about the well- and ill-formedness of language in interaction. I am fascinated by the question about what, if anything, in the grammar of interactional language is universal as well as the range of variation. Finding answers to these questions will allow us to gain deeper insight into the architecture of the language faculty. Moreover it should lead to a better understanding of the cognitive roots of human language as well as its social impact.