Congratulations to Isabella Fritz on receiving a prestigious 2026 FWF ASTRA Award from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The award, worth up to €1 million over five years, supports outstanding early-career researchers in establishing independent research programmes and advancing to leadership positions in their fields. The awards were presented at the Austrian Science Awards ceremony, held on 24 June at Vienna City Hall in the presence of representatives from Austria's research and higher education community.
As part of the award, Isabella will lead the project Phonology in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon at the Acoustics Research Institute (ARI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The project will investigate how the languages a person knows interact when speaking a foreign language, with a particular focus on how similarities between the sound systems of different languages influence speech production and comprehension.
