Growing Up in Science – Berlin with Prof. Dr. Salvador Soto Faraco

The Official Story

I graduated in Psychology (1994) and completed a PhD in Cognitive Science and Language (1999) at the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. I published work on lexical access, and on auditory perception. After the PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford University (UK) and at the University of British Columbia (Canada), where I became a fellow of the Killam Family Trust. In my postdoc I worked mostly on human perception and attention in multisensory environments, and published a variety of papers on the Attentional Blink and Cross-modal Motion Capture.

By 2002 I returned to Spain under a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship, to establish a laboratory in Universitat de Barcelona as an independent researcher. In 2005 I became ICREA Research Professor and established the Multisensory Research Group at the Parc Científic de Barcelona first, and then moved to Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2009. During these initial years I concentrated on the study of the effects of attention in multisensory integration in a variety of domains. In 2010 I received an individual Starting Grant from the ERC which helped me consolidate this research program, and expand to neuroimaging methodologies.

Currently, my group works on basic and applied research projects across a wider set of domains, from decision making to memory, as well as our multisensory work. The support for our research comes mostly from public agencies (MINECO, AGAUR) including European regional development funds (FEDER), and some private funding agencies (La Caixa, BBVA, BIAL). ICREA has kindly supported my position since 2005. Now I combine research and teaching as one of the group leaders at the Center for Brain and Cognition, in Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

His Unofficial Story

I ended up enrolling in psychology as a vital compromise, though I was more motivated by journalism or history. Since I knew computer programming when very few people did, I could obtain university internships in research groups. I finished in 1994, but did not consider a PhD as an option because my grades were too mediocre for funding. However, in 1995 I was unexpectedly offered an opportunity. At the beginning I was confused regarding what my PhD would be about, so I pursued several unconnected lines of research. During those early days, it was strongly suggested to me that I travel and visit other labs. This turned out to be excellent advice. I visited the LSCP in Paris, the Georgetown University Medical School, and the Experimental Psychology Department in Oxford. During these visits I was incredibly lucky to meet some amazingly clever and altruistic people who found the time and patience to discuss my research and point me to interesting questions, problems, and connections. I was both tremendously inspired and intimidated by them.

The subject of my PhD, when I finally closed in on one, ended up being a niche question, of interest to me and about four more people in the world. In consequence, my early conference presentations, and later my first papers, were mostly received with polite indifference. Yet, in 1998, one of my visits took me to Charles Spence and his then-under-construction Crossmodal Research Laboratory. That was another stroke of good luck, because it was fairly straight forward to incorporate a multisensory twist to my ongoing research, and made me more visible. Though I considered my options in the real world after finishing the PhD in 1999, I soon realised I was not attractive for the job market, nor it for me. So I quietly receded into academia again with nothing but hope. I tend to forget the fact that during my postdoc years, from 1999 to 2002 in the UK and Canada, I was almost permanently looking for a job and living off of credit. This would have been overly too stressing had it not been a very intellectually fulfilling time. Lessening the stress even more, I was lucky my partner at the time was willing and able to join me in Canada.

When I returned to Europe, I was terrified I would be not competitive for jobs, or worse, that I would end up in a job that would bury me in teaching and administration for the rest of my days. Therefore, as the responsible adult that I had become, I evaded the problem by embarking on yet another insecure research position, instead of signing a job contract for a lectureship. Destiny rewarded my foolishness when in 2005 ICREA decided to fund me to work permanently as a researcher in Catalan institutions. My position does not make it mandatory to teach or work in administration, though I have ended up doing quite a bit of both over the years. Currently, I am a fallen Psychologist working in a Computer Science department, leading what is arguably the best research group in the world.