Gláucia Laís Salomão Wins Prestigious International Award at The Voice Foundation

 Gláucia Laís Salomão, PhD, researcher at Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, has been named the 2026 recipient of the Hamdan International Presenter Award by The Voice Foundation. The award recognises her presentation How the Brain Imagines the Voice: Insights from Neuroimaging Analyses, delivered at The Voice Foundation's Annual Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice.
The Hamdan International Presenter Award is given each year to an outstanding investigator traveling from outside North America to present at the symposium. Recipients are selected based on the quality and impact of their research and the complexity of their work.
Dr. Salomão's work sits at the intersection of voice science, phonetics, and affective neuroscience. Her research explores how the brain processes and responds to emotional voices, including the neural mechanisms underlying empathy. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and galvanic skin response (GSR), supported by SUBIC, she investigates both what happens in the brain when people listen to others' emotional voices, and how brain activity changes when people themselves express emotions vocally.
This line of research grew out of a project funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, for which Dr. Salomão received a grant of SEK 3.7 million. The project, running 2023–2025, set out to examine whether people share others' emotions through common neural representations — a hypothesis well-studied in relation to facial expressions, but never before systematically explored in the context of the voice.

"We make subjective processes visible and measurable," says Dr. Salomão of the neuroimaging approach that underpins her work.
The award reflects both the scientific significance of the research and the growing international profile of voice and brain science being carried out at SUBIC.

Read more about the Project on voice and empathy receives grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Read more about Hamdan International Presenter Award for Investigators.