Dr. García becomes the first Latin American to earn this coveted accolade.

For the past 15 years, Dr. Adolfo García has worked tirelessly at the intersection of language science and neuroscience. His dedication has earned him the 2024 Early Career Award from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL). SNL is an NIH-funded non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary research on the links between language and brain systems. Since its foundation, in 2010, it has become the world’s central forum on the topic, with annual conferences that bring together leading authorities, rising stars, and younger scholars.

Each year, SNL recognizes the contribution of outstanding researchers in different career stages. In particular, the Early Career Award honors researchers who demonstrate high quality science and academic citizenship, and who obtained their Ph.D. not more than 10 years before. The award is funded by the journal Brain and Language and recipients are selected from multiple nominations by SNL members.

Past laureates include researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Germany), New York University (USA), University of Michigan (USA), University of Washington (USA), University of London (UK), Université Laval (Canada), and Radboud University (Netherlands). Dr. García, Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (UdeSA, Argentina) and Associate Researcher at Universidad de Santiago de Chile, now becomes the first Latin American to join this selected list.

Also a Senior Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute (UCSF, USA), Dr. García was noted for his contributions to understanding embodied language processes, the neurobiology of bilingualism, and speech biomarkers of brain disorders. His nomination highlighted discoveries on how sensorimotor brain systems contribute to speech and language processes; the identification of spatiotemporal signatures of action verbs, face-related nouns, and social words; the establishment of subject-level differences among bilingual individuals; and the validation of linguistic markers of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, frontotemporal dementia, and other conditions.

Dr. García emphasizes the collective nature of the award. “All the work behind this stems from the collective effort of mentors, colleagues, students, and supporters. Our papers have an average of over 7 authors; our largest grants involve multiple investigators, collaborators, and administrative experts; each mass dissemination action brings together a large, diverse staff… It is customary to give awards to the eldest members of a team, but that is just a practical convention: this is a distinction to the decades-long research ecosystem we have built with friends in Latin American and the rest of the world.”

Rooted in local-global connections, Dr. García’s work had been previously recognized by the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, the Argentine Association of Behavioral Science, the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires, the Alzheimer’s Association, and Harvard’s Ig Nobel prize. This new accolade attests to the relevance of Latin American neurolinguistics in the field’s worldwide landscape.