2026 Early Career Award Recipient
Oscar Woolnough
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2026 Early Career Award recipient: Oscar Woolnough
Speaker: Oscar Woolnough, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
About Oscar Woolnough
Dr. Oscar Woolnough is an emerging leader in the cognitive neuroscience of language, whose work has significantly advanced our understanding of how the human brain reads, comprehends language, and acquires new words. He holds a BEng in Medical Engineering from Queen Mary, University of London, an MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London, and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Nottingham.
Dr. Woolnough's research leverages intracranial recordings to investigate the neural representations underpinning reading, exploiting the high spatiotemporal resolution of this technique to track the dynamic spread of information across cortical surfaces and the interactions between multiple functional hubs. By coupling these recordings with direct cortical stimulation, his work establishes causal links between specific brain regions and reading behavior.
His publication record reflects the breadth and rigor of his contributions. Notable work includes spatiotemporal mapping of orthographic and lexical processing in the ventral visual pathway, characterization of frontotemporal networks supporting sentence reading, and dissociation of reading and naming in ventral occipitotemporal cortex. His most recent work has examined how anterior fusiform activity during reading correlates with the memorability of novel words, and how frontotemporal networks causally support concreteness judgments.
Motivated by the real-world challenges of dyslexia and dysgraphia, Dr. Woolnough's research directly links neural activity to behavior, with the long-term goal of illuminating the brain basis of literacy and how reading networks change as new words are incorporated into the lexicon. His contributions, both methodological and empirical, make him an exceptionally deserving recipient of this Early Career Award.