Five University of Pennsylvania professors from the School of Arts & Sciences, Perelman School of Medicine, and School of Engineering and Applied Science have been elected 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows. They are among 471 researchers being honored this year across 24 scientific disciplines.
AAAS, a society with a mission to “advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all,” has named a class of Fellows since 1874. This year’s honorees will be celebrated at a forum in Washington, D.C., in June.
Marlyse Baptista is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, director of the Language Contact and Cognition Lab, and MindCORE faculty affiliate in the School of Arts & Sciences. She specializes in language contact, the morphosyntax of Pidgin and Creole languages, and theories of Creole genesis. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes involved in the emergence and development of Creoles. She has developed a theoretical model of language convergence in multilingual settings and has conducted interdisciplinary collaborations investigating Creoles, using empirical, theoretical, experimental, and computational methods. She collaborated with geneticists to unveil the founding populations of Cabo Verde and identify the source languages that contributed to Cabo Verdean Creole. She has published in Language, Cognition, the Annual Review of Anthropology, Lingua, Frontiers in Language Sciences, and Current Biology. She has served as president of the Linguistic Society of America and the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and she has been named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and of the Michigan Society of Fellows. Baptista is being recognized “for distinguished contributions to the field of linguistics, particularly for theoretical and cognitive modeling of Creole languages, language contact, and language emergence.”
For the complete Penn Today article: