Pascal Mamassian was born in Lyon and was trained in Telecommunication Engineering (Sup' Télécom, Paris). He then obtained a Master in Cognitive Sciences and a PhD in Experimental and Biological Psychology (Univ. of Minnesota, USA). He has worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany) and New York University. He was at the University of Glasgow as lecturer and then senior lecturer before taking a researcher position at the CNRS. Research in his group focuses on mid-level vision, the link between the processing of elementary features in the image and the awareness of natural scenes.