The neuroscientist Gustavo Deco, a full professor and researcher in the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) at UPF, has been elected new member of Academia Europaea, an association of many of the most prominent scholars from all academic disciplines from across Europe. The association’s president, Marja Makarov, recently confirmed Gustavo Deco’s nomination as a member of Academia Europaea (MAE).

In doing so, Academia Europaea, a non-profit organisation that promotes scientific excellence, recognises Deco’s accomplishments in the field of neuroscience. As a new MAE, Deco will have the opportunity to take part in the Academia Europaea’s 2024 annual conference, which is slated to take place in Wroclaw (Poland) from 26-28 November, where he may present his main lines of research.

The research interests of this full professor at UPF and ICREA (Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies) researcher are related to perceptions, memories and emotions. The main aim of his research is to provide a precise account of the mechanisms underlying brain dynamics and higher brain functions through computational methods. He also studies how alterations in these dynamics lead to brain diseases. His research integrates different levels of experimental investigation in cognitive neuroscience (from the operation of single neurons and neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuroimaging and neuropsychology to behaviour) via a unifying theoretical framework that captures the neural dynamics inherent in the computation of cognitive processes. His most highly cited line of research in scientific publications focuses on the whole-brain computational modelling of the ongoing spontaneous activity of brain networks in resting state (i.e. when no specific cognitive task is being performed), which provides an understanding as to why the manner in which these networks operate is related to states of health and illness.

Deco currently heads the Computational Neuroscience Group in UPF’s Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC), which he also directed from 2000 to 2021. In the past decade, he has led a number of European research projects that have received grants from the European Research Council (ERC), as part of a long and prestigious academic and research career. In 2011, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant and, in 2022, an ERC Synergy Grant. It should also be noted that, in 2023, he was among the world’s most highly cited researchers, according to the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher ranking. Since 2022, he has also been a member of the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg and, in 2011, was awarded the Siemens Inventor of the Year Prize.

Gustavo earned a PhD in Physics in 1987 and for the next three years worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bordeaux in France and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Giessen in Germany. From 1990-2003, he directed the Computational Neuroscience Group at the Siemens Corporate Research Centre in Munich, Germany. In 1997, he earned a PhD and Habilitation (top academic degree in Germany) in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich and, in 2001, received a PhD in Psychology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich.

Academia Europaea

Academia Europaea was founded in 1988 by the UK’s Royal Society and other national European academies. It is a non-profit organisation registered both in the United Kingdom and Germany and is the only Academy whose individual members reside both in countries of the Council of Europe and other nations around the world. Its members, of which there are currently close to 5,500, are prominent scientists from the full array of academic disciplines.