Science and Innovation

This year, 2023, the Residence for Researchers CSIC-Generalitat of Catalonia is 25 years old. On 16 November, the facility, the result of a consortium made up of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Generalitat of Catalonia, celebrated with an event entitled Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in Scientific Research, which was attended by Joan Gómez Pallarès, director general of Research and president of the Residence for Researchers Consortium, Andreu Mas-Colell, president of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), and Marina Villegas, delegate of the CSIC in the Community of Madrid.

The Residence for Researchers project began in 1993, when the CSIC and the Generalitat de Catalunya agreed to create a consortium to promote a place to host researchers with a twofold objective: to offer a space where people from the academic and research community could stay during their stays in Barcelona and, on the other hand, to become a place for meeting, reflection and dialogue between science and culture.

It was not until 16 November 1998 that the project materialised with the inauguration of the Residence for Researchers in the building on the corner of Carrer Egipcíaques and Carrer Hospital in Barcelona’s Raval district, next to the building that houses the CSIC Delegation in Catalonia and the Milà i Fontanals Institution for Research in the Humanities, also belonging to the CSIC. The logo was designed by the poet and visual artist Joan Brossa, who created an image that unites two open questions to reflect the constant questioning of science, “which is always looking for answers in the natural and social world”. The Residence for Researchers is currently directed by Lluís Calvo, delegate of the CSIC in Catalonia.

Some figures

During these 25 years of history, more than 127,000 people have attended the Residence’s activities and more than 400,000 people have stayed at the Residence. In addition, between 1998 and 2023, the Residence has organised and hosted more than 6,000 academic and dissemination activities: events, congresses, seminars, research project meetings, exhibitions, concerts… Among these, it also organises cycles of talks and conferences, which individually add up to more than 10,000 activities. Among the activities, we can highlight the cycle Science Mondays, which has been held annually since 2013 and aims to inform the public about the research being carried out in socially relevant areas such as global change, energy, migration, food or disease.

Among the illustrious visitors who have taken part in the Residence’s activities are the historian Miquel Batllori (1909-2003), the pianist and composer Joan Guinjoan (1931-2019; who also composed the work Verbum Genoma in Musica, for the Residence for Researchers). Likewise, prominent names such as the biochemist Margarita Salas (1938-2019), CSIC researcher and promoter of molecular biology in Spain, Federico Mayor Zaragoza (1934), director of UNESCO between 1987 and 1999, the oncologist Joan Massagué (1953), director of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (USA), or the physicist Juan Ignacio Cirac (1965), director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany), among others, have given lectures at the Residence.

For all these reasons, in 2014 the Residence for Researchers received the National Prize for Scientific Communication, awarded by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRi).

Source: CSIC Delegation in Catalonia