Balthasar Bickel (Sapir Professor)
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Balthasar Bickel is Professor of General Linguistics in the Department of Comparative Language Science at the University of Zurich. Since 2020 he has been the Director of a National Research Center in Switzerland, the NCCR Evolving Language, which unites over 40 research groups from across the natural, social, and computational sciences to unravel the past and future of human language. In his research, he uses experimental and data-science methods across languages and species to uncover the cultural and biological forces that determine how languages evolve over time and space, how they are processed and produced in our brains, and how they are acquired by children and adults.