Before the current crisis in Europe of migration and refugees, members of the consortium of the MultiMind  project realized the need to urgently investigate multilingualism, from a multidisciplinary perspective, that could overcome the gap between basic and applied research and that could tackle the social challenges of education and health of migrants and refugees in Europe.

To this end, on 1 April the European project MultiMind started, with a duration of four years and a budget of 3,778,888.68 euros in order to establish a multidisciplinary, multisectorial international training network (European Training Network) on multilingualism. The network will deal with the advantages and the challenges of multilingualism thanks to an innovative research programme that combines basic and applied research through a variety of disciplines that focus on different social and educational environments.

MultiMind is a project of the EU H2020 framework programme, coordinated by Theodoros Marinis, University of Reading (UK), consisting of a consortium of nine academic and non-academic organizations, as well as sixteen partners from academic institutions, companies, healthcare organizations and five branches of Bilingualism Matters, an important international network of centres that provide outreach activities on multilingualism.

The consortium comprises Núria Sebastián, head of the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) research group, and Albert Costa, ICREA research professor and head of the Speech Production and Bilingualism (SPB) group, both pertaining to the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) of Pompeu Fabra University.

The consortium brings together researchers who are experts in different branches of knowledge: linguistics, psychology, education, neuroscience, along with non-academic partners working in the sectors of education, health, information technologies and publishing.

In accordance with the social challenges in education and health and the challenges related to the crisis of refugees and migrants in Europe, the project will combine different state-of-the-art methodologies to study the influence of multilingualism in various fields such as language learning, cognition, creativity and decision making, brain function and structure, as well as its role in atypical populations.

As a European Training Network, MultiMind will train a new generation of researchers in the world’s leading laboratories who, through the use of these cutting edge methodologies, will develop the skills needed to foster their professional progress as independent researchers in academic and non-academic sectors.

MultiMind Consortium:

Coordinator: THE UNIVERSITY OF READING (United Kingdom)

Participants:

UNIVERSITAT KONSTANZ (Germany)

UNIVERSITA' DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO-BICOCCA (Italy)

UNIWERSYTET JAGIELLONSKI (Poland)

POMPEU FABRA UNIVERSITY (Spain)

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN (Netherlands)

ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS (Greece)

UNIVERSITI PUTRA MALAYSIA (Malaysia)

UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE (Switzerland)

IRCCS - ASSOCIAZIONE LA NOSTRA FAMIGLIA 'ISTITUTO SCIENTIFICO EUGENIO MEDEA' (Italy)

CENTRO PROVINCIALE PER L'ISTRUZIONEDEGLI ADULTI PALERMO 1 (Italy)