2026 Dissertation Award Recipient

Ilina Bhaya-Grossman

The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2026 Dissertation Award recipient: Ilina Bhaya-Grossman

Speaker: Ilina Bhaya-Grossman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Psychology Department, Stanford University.

About Ilina Bhaya-Grossman

Ilina Bhaya-Grossman completed her PhD under the guidance of Dr. Edward F. Chang through the joint UCSF-UC Berkeley Graduate Program in December 2025. Prior to her graduate studies, Ilina earned her bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science, magna cum laude, from UC Berkeley, where she conducted research in the lab of Dr. Robert Knight. Her dissertation asks how the brain balances the universal and language-specific aspects of speech. Drawing on human intracranial recordings, it proposes an updated model of speech processing in which acoustic and language-specific word-level information are integrated in a shared cortical region, the superior temporal gyrus. Her research has been published in Nature, Neuron, the Annual Review of Psychology, and Nature Biomedical Engineering among others, and her training has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the UCSF Discovery Fellowship, and the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public.