Independent Researcher

Project Officer

Thesis Title: Archaeology, Museums and Computers: semiotic approach to the use of Virtual Reality for the dissemination of Archaeology in Museums

About

Laia Pujol Tost was born in Barcelona in 1976. She followed undergraduate studies at the University of Bordeaux-I (Maîtrise in Prehistory) and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), where she was awarded the Best Mark of the Degree of History in 1999. In 2003, she obtained at the UAB the M. Phil. in Prehistorical Archaeology. For the realization of her doctorate she received from the Catalan Government a fellowship for predoctoral studies and from the European Union a Marie-Curie Early Stage Research Training Fellowship. In November 2006 she was awarded at the UAB an European Ph.D. after the achievement of her doctoral research project “Archaeology, museums and computers: semiotic approach to the use of VR for the dissemination of Archaeology in museums”.

Currently, she is Project Officer at the Acropolis Museum in Athens under the EU funded project CHESS (http://www.chessexperience.eu/j/), where she works on the development of personalised digital stories for mobile devices. Previously, she was principal researcher in Heritage and ICT at Tecnalia R&D Foundation in Spain. Before that, she was appointed twice as Marie Curie Fellow at the Museology Lab of the Department of Cultural Informatics of the University of the Aegean, and as British Academy visiting research fellow at the Centre for Museology the University of Manchester. At bothe places she worked on the evaluation of ICT applications in museums. She was also hired by the Centre for the Study of Prehistoric and Archaeological Heritage of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), where she developped national and international Cultural Heritage projects involving ICT. She has also been lecturer at the UAB (Degree of History, Doctorate in Didactics of the Social Sciences) and at the University of Girona (Master in Cultural Tourism), and worked as archaeologist for the Local Architectural Heritage Service of Barcelona.

Her research fields are the use and evaluation of ICT applications in museums and Archaeology, in relation to which she has participated in several funded projects and archaeological excavations in France and Spain; she has presented several papers in journals and conferences –two of them awarded by VSMM Society–; and she has chaired international conferences and workshops. She is member of the scientific committee of ACE, TAG and CAA international conferences.