Full professor Louise McNally Seifert has received the Humboldt Research Award granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). This award is granted in recognition of her entire research career while encouraging international scientific cooperation, for which professor McNally is to participate in research projects of her own choice in cooperation with expert colleagues from Germany. The prize includes a 6-12 month stage at a German university, in this case the Humboldt University.

Professor McNally’s scientific area of specialization is the study of the semantics of natural language and as she explains “by “natural language” we understand the languages ​​spoken by humans, both oral and sign languages. They have evolved organically among all speakers and this has a consequence that we do not usually consider: what we find in a descriptive grammar is just an abstract approach to what there is in common in everyone’s coordinated linguistic behaviour”.

Louise McNally, born in the United States in 1965, received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1992). Before joining UPF in 1995, she worked at the University of Indiana, at Ohio State University and at the University of California in San Diego. Since 1995 she has worked as a lecturer and researcher at UPF and is now full professor of Linguistics at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL) (2008) and is a member of the Formal Linguistics Research Group (GLIF). She has been vice-rector for Research, vice-rector for the University’s Organization and Academic Project (2015-2017) and vice-rector for Teaching Staff (2011-2015). She was awarded the ICREA Acadèmia prize in 2008 and 2013.

In 2015 she was elected for the period 2016-2019 as a member of the Electorate Nominating Committee of AAAS, within the “Linguistics and Language Science” section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest scientific society, for the period 2016-2019. She directs and participates in numerous research projects and is the author of articles and papers published in her speciality.