It is with great sadness that we announce that our editorial board member Professor Albert Costa unexpectedly passed away on December 10th 2018 at the age of 48. Albert was a highly esteemed personality in bilingualism research and, in cognitive neuroscience, he had an overarching status as an academic teacher, scientist, colleague, and as a friend. Even with his premature death, Albert's contribution was highly influential on our field, and his seminal contributions will pave the way for future research endeavors. Albert developed his influential research along many different lines. Starting in the late nineties, he investigated the highly debated issue of parallel activation of languages in bilinguals, by using behavioral research methods. In 1999, he published the seminal paper entitled “Lexical Selection in Bilinguals: Do Words in the Bilingual's Two Lexicons Compete for Selection?”, together with Michele Miozzo and Alfonso Caramazza: it was published in the Journal of Memory and Language and subsequently became a milestone in the field. In the years after, Albert's work was devoted not only to mechanisms of parallel activation during bilingual language production, but, during the 2000s, his research focused more and more on general language switching mechanisms and the relationship between bilingual language production and cognitive control. Of particular importance is his behavioral work on how the degree of language proficiency modulates language-switching costs. Albert was always an open-minded researcher, and, like many other behavioral scientists, after some initial skepticism he embraced functional and structural neuroimaging techniques to further advance his research interests in the late 2000s. Indeed, he published many studies on the neurobiological basis of the switching mechanism and of language and cognitive control in bilingual populations. Of interest, in the last years Albert pioneered a new line of research in the field of emotional processing in second language speakers, and the idea that individuals may make more rational decisions by using their second language is inevitably linked to Albert's name.
Albert was not only an excellent researcher but also an excellent teacher. Many young researchers in our field, including some of our editorial board members, were inspired by Albert's insights and teaching. We are confident that these young colleagues will help disseminate Prof. Albert Costa's research and legacy. Many of us have known Albert in person, a colleague with whom we had prolific discussions and exchanges of ideas at conferences and meetings. We will hence immensely miss all those good times we had together, and our thoughts go to his family and close friends.
