2023 Revelle Medalist: Marta Kutas

The Revelle Medal is the highest honor given by the chancellor to a retired or emeriti UC San Diego faculty member.
Marta Kutas - who served for 12 years as chair of the Department of Cognitive Science and directed the Center for Research in Language for nearly 20 - loves to play with words as much as she loves to work with them. A renowned researcher of the brain processes involved in language comprehension and meaning construction, Kutas is also a poet who sometimes turns her scientific insights into rhymed stanzas. Credited with a long list of papers cited more than 60,000 times, Kutas is perhaps best known for co-discovering the N400, a brain response recorded at the human scalp that peaks around 400ms after the onset of any potentially meaningful item such as a written, spoken, signed or depicted word. Kutas’ lab also studied how people learn and remember and make decisions. Among Kutas’ many honors: distinguished career awards from the Society of Psychophysiological Research and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.