Manuel Carreiras. National Award for Pascual Madoz Research, in the area of Economic and Social Law and Science.

Manuel Carreiras has made innovative contributions in the field of experimental psychology. Her research focuses on the processes involved in reading and learning in populations of deaf, dyslexic, brain-damaged, illiterate and neuro-typical people, as well as bilingualism and the processes of learning second oral languages and signs. For Carreiras, there are many challenges ahead in the field of experimental psychology, but “perhaps the most important is to understand how the brain gives rise to language, to cognition”.

Manuel Carreiras is scientific director of the BCBL (Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián), with accreditation from the Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence. Her team’s work has a special focus on education and health, an area in which they collaborate with surgeons at Cruces Hospital, providing support for awake patient surgeries, of people who have tumors in brain areas involved in language processes.

According to the researcher Kepa Paz, with a Ramón y Cajal help at the BCBL, Carreiras is considered one of the first researchers in Spain to pose relevant scientific questions within the neurobiology of language.