Andrea Martin appointed as Lise Meitner Group Leader

“It’s a great honor”, says Andrea Martin in reaction to the appointment. “It offers a sense of security I have never had before, and longer-term outlook – a privilege that I want to use to support and uplift the mentees and young scientists in my group. This appointment allows me and my team to develop scientific projects, ideas and theories on the longer term, and take the risk of working on problems that can’t be tackled with only a few years’ work.”

What makes us human

Martin’s research group LaCNS is embedded both at the MPI and at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN) and focusses on how a physiological system like the brain can represent the wealth of expressions available to us in human language. Martin: “We build potentially infinite sentence meanings on the fly, but do so from a finite repertoire of stored information: grammar, words, speech sounds and signs. Statistical regularities are stored in the brain, drawn from experience, and are highly sensitive to contextual factors – yet the human brain manifests a paradox when it comes to language: our everyday language behaviors exemplify the ability to break free from statistics and understand and say things we have never heard before.”

Her group uses computational and neuroscientific approaches to tackle these fundamental questions, and to derive a theory of language representation and processing that is faithful to what is known about linguistics, computational cognitive science, the cognitive neuroscience of language, and neurophysiological bounds on computation. “Language is a big part of what makes us human. Understanding how language works in de brain and the mind is therefore part of understanding who we are and our place in the universe. Eventually this will also lead to transformative consequences for how we bend the world to our will in the form of applications. But ‘insight must precede application’, as Max Planck said.”

Minoritized people in science

The Max Planck Society has established the Lise Meitner Excellence Program in the hope that it will be able to significantly increase the number of women scientists in management positions. “From experience, I think the situation of all minoritized people in science is urgent, structurally complex, deeply unfair, and extremely frustrating”, says Martin. “For me, my experience as a woman is inherently tied up with my experience as a person of color. The same power structures control everything. The situation is discouraging, but at the same time, however woefully insufficient the current and past situations are, I will say that with each passing day, the outlook must be definitionally more promising than it was the day before.”