Congratulations to David Poeppel on Receiving the 2025 Distinguished Career Award!
William Matchin, a member of this year's SNL Committee, presents David Poeppel with the 2025 Distinguished Career Award during the ceremony. Photo: Katrien Segaert
David Poeppel of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main has been awarded the 2025 Distinguished Career Award by the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL). The award ceremony took place on September 13 during the SNL’s annual meeting at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where Poeppel delivered a lecture entitled “Rhythms and Algorithms: The Temporal Structure of Linguistic Experience.”
He was recognized for his exceptional achievements in basic research. The laudatory speech highlighted how Poeppel’s work in auditory and language neuroscience has laid crucial foundations for understanding the neural mechanisms of neural language processing. His research aims to develop a theoretically sound, computationally explicit, and biologically grounded framework for auditory and speech perception as well as language comprehension. A central focus of his work is the anatomy of language processing. Together with his colleague Gregory Hickok, Poeppel developed the influential dual-stream model, which, for the first time, differentiated between two interconnected neural pathways: one for speech perception and one for speech production. This model has been instrumental in expanding and refining our empirical understanding of the architecture of human language.
Poeppel has also played a decisive role in founding and fostering the SNL. He has supervised numerous doctoral students, published more than 230 articles, and is an active participant in online debates, panel discussions, and podcasts.
About the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL)
Founded in 2010, the SNL is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing knowledge about the neurobiological foundations of language and encouraging interdisciplinary exchange. It’s Distinguished Career Award honors researchers who have made exceptional contributions to the field. The next SNL annual meeting will take place from September 30 to October 2, 2026, in Geneva, Switzerland.
