Alexander Huth, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley, has won a prestigious early-career award for his work in decoding semantic language in the brain as a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Career Awards at the Scientific Interface.

The award provides recipients with $500,000 over a five-year period to advance postdoctoral training and faculty service.

“I’m very proud that the Burroughs Wellcome Fund chose to recognize and support my work on how language is processed in the brain,” Huth said. “With the help of this award, I hope to gain new insights into the neural mechanisms that allow the brain to extract meaning from speech.”

Since 2013, six other former UC Berkeley postdoctoral students and researchers have received Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Awards at the Scientific Interface. They are Li Chen, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University; Matthew Good, an assistant professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of Pennsylvania; Ramkumar Sabesan, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington; Michael Vahey, a postdoctoral researcher in bioengineering at UC Berkeley; Gregory Bowman, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Washington University; and Mikhail Shapiro, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

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