ICTP Prize Winner's Paper Among Nature's Best in 2013

The 2004 ICTP Prize winner Bernardo Gabriel Mindlin co-authored a paper that was selected as one of the best articles published in 2013 by Nature. The paper, titled "Elemental gesture dynamics are encoded by song premotor cortical neurons", explored a question that has perplexed language researchers for a long time: What is the basic unit of speech?

Mindlin and his colleagues studied the 'songs' of birds called zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and gathered evidence to show that the song code generated by motor neurons in the bird can be broken into discrete 'gestures' that are significantly shorter than song syllables.

If researchers can similarly uncover how the human vocal apparatus works, they may be able to develop devices that can aid those who lack the ability to speak.

When Mindlin was awarded the ICTP Prize in 2004 he had already made important contributions in the fields of neural modeling, speech recognition and bird songs. At the ICTP Prize ceremony held on 17 May 2005, he gave a lecture on "The Physics and Neural Control of Birdsong". Mindlin is currently a professor of physics at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.