Linguist Mária Gósy received the HUN-REN Excellence Award in 2025

The HUN-REN Excellence Award may be given to a researcher affiliated with HUN-REN who is widely recognized in both the Hungarian and international scientific communities, and who has delivered outstanding scientific performance over many years, with exceptional research results and/or patents to their name.

In 2025, the award went to Professor Mária Gósy, who received the honor at HUN-REN’s December 4 awards gala at the research network’s headquarters on Alkotmány Street.

Mária Gósy is a Széchenyi Prize–winning linguist and phonetician, university professor, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and emerita research professor at the Research Centre for Linguistics. She graduated from Eötvös Loránd University’s Faculty of Humanities in 1975. She has held the title of doctor of the Academy since 1994, and between 2004 and 2007 she served as a member of the Presidium and Governing Board of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

She has worked at the Research Centre for Linguistics since 1975 and headed its Phonetics Department for more than twenty years. She is currently a scientific adviser to the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network, a member of HUN-REN’s Scientific Council, and since 2023 has chaired the Council’s Humanities and Social Sciences College. She is also an elected member of the executive board of the International Phonetic Association.

Her main research areas include speech science, psycholinguistics, and applied speech research, and she has been the first to carry out a number of studies on Hungarian speech. She developed the standardized GMP diagnostic system to examine children’s speech perception and comprehension, and together with colleagues she created a speech-hearing screening method that has been granted patent protection. She is the author of 13 scholarly books and more than 500 scientific publications, cited thousands of times.

For more than two decades she taught at Eötvös Loránd University, and for 15 years she led its Department of Phonetics. Beyond Hungary, she has also taught at universities abroad including Boston and Vienna. As a visiting researcher, she worked at the Perception Research Institute in Eindhoven and in the speech research laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taken part in - and often led - numerous Hungarian and international research projects.

Her scientific work has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including the Széchenyi Prize, the Officer’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit, and the MTA Academy Award.

Professor Mária Gósy’s outstanding career, widely respected in Hungary and internationally, her exemplary teaching, and her lasting scientific achievements unanimously show that this year’s HUN-REN Excellence Award has once again gone to the most deserving recipient.

At the event, young researchers and newly appointed professors emeritus were also honored. The list of those receiving the Róbert Bárány Award and the Research Professor Emeritus title can be found here.