Àlex Gómez-Marín

Àlex Gómez-Marín (Barcelona, 1981) is a Spanish physicist turned neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and a Masters in biophysics from the University of Barcelona. He was a research fellow at the EMBL-CRG Centre for Genomic Regulation and at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon. His research spans from the origins of the arrow of time in inert systems, to the neurobiology of action-perception in living organisms such as flies, worms, mice, and humans. Since 2016 he is the head of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, where he is an Associate Professor of the Spanish Research Council. Combining experimental, computational and theoretical neuro-physics, his current research deals with human minds in the real world, concentrating on what he calls “the edges of consciousness”.

As director of the Pari Center, Alex seeks to enact a kind of intellectual activism that brings a third leg to the “science stool”: apart from solid replicable data and deep imaginative theories, he sees the need to nurture the socio-political milieu that makes science possible (or impossible), bringing together leading thinkers and laypeople in a context that relaxes the self-suffocating constraints of current academe, unapologetically integrating the sciences, the arts, and the sacred.

Alex has recently received some notable mentions, including being on the list of OOOM Magazine’s 100 World’s Most Inspiring People. His research proposal “Seeing without Eyes” won the first Linda G O’Bryant Noetic Research Prize.