Mel Slater DSc, is an ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona in the Faculty of Psychology. He became Professor of Virtual Environments at University College London in 1997 in the Department of Computer Science. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s, and has been first supervisor of 35 PhDs in graphics and virtual reality since 1989. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE Virtual Reality ‘In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality.’  He has been involved in and led several international projects in this field. He held a European Research Council grant TRAVERSE. He was Co Editor-in-Chief of Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments (MIT Press) for a decade. He relinquished that role in 2014 to become Field Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and Chief Editor of the Virtual Environments section.

Mel has contributed to the scientific study of virtual reality and to technical development of this field. He has also contributed to the use of virtual reality in other fields, notably psychology (in relation to clinical psychology – studies of paranoia – and also social psychology) and the cognitive neuroscience of how the brain represents the body.  He has aimed to bring the use of virtual reality as a tool in scientific research in these areas to the highest level – for example, with publications in PNAS, Neuron, Trends in Cognitive Science, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH). His current publications can be seen on http://publicationslist.org/melslater.