Ramón López-Higes

Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He started his scientific career in 1990 when he obtained a Spanish government research grant (FPI program). He presented his doctoral thesis about syntactic processes in reading comprehension in 1992, and this work was distinguished with the UCM’s extraordinary prize. Normal and impaired language processing, particularly in reading comprehension, as well as all topics related to evaluation and intervention strategies have marked all his subsequent work. Within that general framework, Dr. López-Higes has conducted studies about sentence comprehension considering different conditions/restrictions such as individual working memory span, cognitive reserve, syntactic/semantic complexity, etc. He has studied also if interindividual variability in older adults’ sentence comprehension varies depending on age, cognitive status or cognitive reserve. Since he joined to the Cognitive Neuroscience research group (UCM ref: 920283) he has had the opportunity to lead two competitive coordinated projects [Elements to understand subjective memory complaints in aging: effects of training in cognitive tasks and in the reorganization of functional networks (PSI2012-38375-C03-03); Cognitive and neurophysiological characteristics of subjects at high risk of developing dementia: monitoring the effects of cognitive training (PSI2015-68793-C3-3-R)]. Since 2014 to 2018 he was the president of the Asociación Española de Logopedia, Foniatría y Audiología (AELFA), the most important Spanish scientific association in Speech & Language Therapy (SLT). He was also vice-dean of SLT in the faculty of Psychology (UCM) from 2007 to 2010, and director of the Department of Cognitive Processes from 2010 to 2017. He is co-author of more than sixty publications (books and papers) and director of 3 doctoral theses. Projects. Professor López-Higes is working now in a new research project ("Study of the anatomo-functional connectome of AD-relatives: an early intervention on cognitive and lifestyles" [RTI2018-098762-B-C31]) in which a great consortium of researchers are starting to explore the effects of an intervention program combining physical activity, nutrition and cognitive training on middle-age adults’ (with and without familiar antecedents of AD) brain and cognition.