Louise McNally has been elected a member of the AAAS Electorate Nominating Committee of the “Linguistics and Language Science” section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science  (AAAS) for the period 2016-2019. The Electorate Nominating Committees of each section make the nominations in the various positions of the corresponding section.

With over 120,000 members, the AAAS is the world’s largest scientific society and is responsible for the publication of the prestigious journal Science. From among all the candidates selected at these elections only two universities from outside the US are represented, one of which is Pompeu Fabra University. The mandates of the different charges will begin as of the 182^nd Annual Meeting of the AAAS, which is to take place on 16 February in Washington DC. 

”Linguistics and Language Science” is one of the 24 sections into which the AAAS is organized and its mission is to promote the understanding of language and language sciences and the dissemination of the scientific breakthroughs that take place in this area of knowledge. The AAAS’s linguistics and language sciences section is defined as a highly interdisciplinary section that includes such diverse areas as computational linguistics, language education, speech therapy and lexicography, and actively collaborates with other sections of the AAAS.

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.

She is a full professor of Linguistics at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL) and a member of the Formal Linguistics Research Group (GLIF). She was awarded the ICREA Acadèmia prize in 2008 and 2013. She is currently vice-rector for the organization and academic project of the University. Her scientific speciality is the study of the semantics of natural language.