Thomas Sturm, ICREA Research Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), studied philosophy, history, and political science at the University of Göttingen and the University of California San Diego. He obtained his PhD in 2007 from the University of Marburg. Before joining ICREA (Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies) in 2014, he worked at various institutions including the University of Marburg (1995-2000), the University of California San Diego (2000), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2001-2005), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2005-2009). He is also a member of the IHC (UAB), the LOGOS group (UB), the Kant-edition at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Associate Research Fellow at the Wundt Center for Philosophy and History of Psychology at Federal Juiz de Fora University (Brazil). In 2019, he became elected member of the Academia Europea.

His research focuses on how rationality is understood in philosophy and the human sciences and how it should be understood. He studies aspects of reason in Kant's philosophy, analyses the history as well as the potentials and limits of current psychological and philosophical theories of rationality, and examines their role in politics, ethics, and education. He methodologically combines tools of analytic philosophy and history of science. He currently heads the project Critical Reasoning, Philosophy in Secondary Schools and the Education of Democratic Citizens of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities.