The UAB's new Faculty of Psychology consolidates its commitment with the health sector

Firm decision by the UAB to help meet the social need of having more healthcare personnel available through public administrations

The UAB has opened a tender for the creation of a new building, to be located next to the Faculty of Medicine, which in different phases will construct four independent modules, with a common access and connected to the Faculty of Medicine, and with a surface area of 10,000 square metres. The project’s first phase will include the construction of two towers which will house the Faculty of Psychology, the Institute for Neuroscience and other advanced research spaces for the health sciences. An executive project will be drafted by next summer and the first phase of the project is expected to be finished for the 2026/27 academic year.

This firm decision by the UAB to focus on health is not only due to it having one of the largest number of medical and psychology students in the country, but also becuase it works with a strong network of leading university hospitals such as the Vall d’Hebron Hospital, Sant Pau Hospital, Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital (Can Ruti) and the Parc Taulí Hospital, as well as many collaborations with healthcare institutes, administrations and universities.

In the past few years, the UAB has aimed to respond with determination to the social demands of more healthcare personnel available through public administration by providing more places for aspiring medical and nursing students, which in this case will be seen with new nurses graduating from hospitals in Badalona (Can Ruti) and Sabadell (Parc Taulí).

Always at the forefront, the UAB's global vision of health also includes Veterinary Medicine (according to the Shanghai ranking, the UAB Faculty of Veterinary Medicine is the top fifth in the world), with a strong commitment to the One Health concept, which refers to a new way of concieving health as an interdisciplinary matter englobing the health of patients, animals and the planet as one global and inseparable whole.

And alongside the academic training in health is the cutting-edge research conducted from the departments, the CORE in Mental Health, research institutes in partner hospitals and UAB research centres such as the Institute of Fundamental Biology (IBB), the CBATEG or the Institute of Neurosciences, now located at the Faculty of Medicine and which will have its own space in the new building complex.

An academic tradition born with the founding of the UAB

The Faculty of Psychology has more than two thousand undergraduate and official master's degree students. It offers 360 new places each year on the Psychology degree (and 80 on the Speech Therapy degree, the only public degree in Catalonia) and is one of the most popular degrees future students apply for, particularly since 2020, with over 3,000 applications for these 360 places.

The faculty was created in 1989 as a transformation of the Psychology Section of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, but it comes from a much earlier tradition of training in psychology and speech therapy, which began with the creation of the Unviersitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 1968. In those first years, academic activity took place at the Monastery of Sant Cugat, then at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, and then at the recently inaugurated Bellaterra campus in the 1973/74 academic year. Located in building B, one of the original buildings on the Bellaterra campus, it currently shares space with the Faculties of Arts & Humanities, Political Science and Sociology, Economics and Business, and Law. It offers degrees in Psychology and Speech Therapy and a variety of master's degrees, and offers services such as the Psychology and Speech Therapy Service (SPL), which carries out research and knowledge transfer activities as well as providing care.

Apart from bringing together the campus centres dedicated to human health in the same area, the new building will also free up space to improve the teaching and research of the centres with which it now shares spaces.

For its part, the Institut de Neurociències (INc-UAB) will leave the space it now occupies in the Faculty of Medicine, but will not move far away, as it will have a space in the new complex, which will connect directly with this faculty. Founded in 2003, a group of specialists from different disciplines working on the study of the nervous system at different UAB centres created a joint platform that served to join forces and create synergies between research groups.

The institute has stimulated, promoted and conducted high-level multidisciplinary basic research, contributing to the understanding of the causes and mechanisms leading to nervous system dysfunction and degeneration, and has grown steadily over the past 20 years.