News: Lucía Amoruso, Deputy Director of BCBL: “We want to train ambassadors for our approach to science”

• The Argentine researcher, who holds a PhD in Psychology and is an Ikerbasque associate professor, reflects on the challenge presented by her new position at the research center.

Since early 2026, Lucía Amoruso has been Deputy Scientific Director of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) and head of the “Neurobiology of Language” research group. She holds a PhD in Psychology with a specialization in Cognitive Neuroscience, is an Ikerbasque Associate Professor and a Ramón y Cajal researcher. Her work focuses on understanding how language affects the organization of the brain, particularly in multilingual contexts and in people with brain damage.

Two factors have shaped the Argentine researcher’s professional development. Firstly, mobility. Throughout her career, she has worked in Argentina, Switzerland, Italy and Spain—an experience that has enabled her to discover different approaches to scientific research, build networks and grow both academically and personally. “Starting from scratch in a new place means stepping out of your comfort zone and facing many challenges. I think those experiences made me a more resilient person,” she says.

On the other hand, meeting mentors who were not only scientifically outstanding but also profoundly generous. Amoruso quotes a well-known phrase attributed to Isaac Newton to describe this impact: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. In her case, those “Giants” were people who not only imparted knowledge and scientific rigor to her, but also gave her the space to grow, develop her own ideas and forge an independent career path.

What does this new challenge of being Deputy Director of BCBL mean to you, and how do you hope to contribute to the center’s development in this position?

This new challenge represents a recognition of my career and my work at BCBL over the past few years, but above all, it entails an enormous scientific and strategic responsibility. It is not just about leading a line of research or coordinating a group, but about contributing to a global agenda and guiding the center's direction in the coming years.

While it is a great challenge, I have the tools to carry it out and I have an excellent, highly talented team at BCBL. I believe the challenge also lies in ensuring that we all work towards a common goal and share a common culture.

The idea is that the people who work with us will leave with a clear sense of how we do science, and then become ambassadors for this ‘BCBL identity’ to the rest of the world.

What are the main challenges that language science will face in the coming years?

One of the main challenges we face is studying language under conditions that more closely resemble how it occurs in the real world. For a long time, we have worked with highly controlled models, focused on isolated individuals performing tasks in the laboratory. This approach has been necessary and very useful, but it is limited. The challenge now is to move toward more naturalistic approaches that allow us to capture real-life interactions between people as they communicate, in more ecologically sensitive contexts.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence represent a unique and extremely powerful tool towards this end. In particular, Large Language Models allow us to study language in contexts that are much closer to how we use it in the real world, capturing regularities and patterns which, due to their complexity and scale, were previously inaccessible to the human eye.

What projects are you currently leading at the center?

I currently lead several research projects at the center. One of these, in collaboration with Cruces University Hospital, focuses on mapping and preserving language function in patients with brain tumors who undergo awake surgery.

From a clinical perspective, we work alongside neurosurgeons during surgery to identify and protect each patient’s critical language functions. In multilingual patients, we map the different languages they speak to reduce the risk of post-operative difficulties in communicating in any of them.

From a scientific perspective, the project allows us to study how the brain adapts to injury. These tumors tend to grow slowly, which gives the brain time to activate neuroplasticity mechanisms and shift functions to healthy areas. This helps us to better understand how language is preserved in these patients.

Another project I am currently working on focuses on how multilingualism can act as a protective factor against accelerated ageing and Alzheimer’s disease. Using machine learning models, we predict people’s brain age beyond their chronological age and analyze how the use of multiple languages relates to patterns of cognitive preservation and biologically younger brains.

Finally, I am also working on a research line focused on markers of spontaneous speech for the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Using machine learning models, we analyze what people say naturally and identify subtle patterns in the way they express themselves. For example, the words they choose, their rhythm, their prosody, and the number of pauses. These indicators allow us to identify early signs of cognitive decline even before clear clinical symptoms of dementia appear.