Tamara Swaab, professor of psychology at UC Davis, has been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, or KHMW, one of the highest honors bestowed on scholars in the Netherlands.
Swaab, who has served on the faculty in psychology since 1998 and is an affiliate of the Center for Mind and Brain, is widely recognized for her research on how the brain supports language comprehension and adapts to different language environments across people’s lives.
This honor has special importance because Swaab was born and raised in the Netherlands, and only left to pursue an academic post at UC Davis after finishing her Ph.D.
“I feel so honored,” said Swaab. “As a member, I look forward to contributing to the KHMW’s mission of building bridges between science and society.”
A career studying language and cognition
Swaab’s interest in neuroscience began in her undergraduate years. During her Ph.D. studies at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, she conducted pioneering research on language comprehension in people with aphasia following stroke.
By recording brain activity while patients listened to language, she showed that comprehension difficulties often reflected delays in processing rather than a loss of word knowledge. These findings, published in the late 1990s, formed the foundation of her doctoral research and helped reshape how we understand language processing after brain injury.
Swaab later studied how aging affects language comprehension. Changes in cognition may make it harder to remember or pay attention, but a vast experience with language might fill in gaps in real-time understanding.
More recently, her work has focused on how the brain anticipates and predicts upcoming language, enabling listeners to perceive and understand spoken input, even though the input might be incomplete, ambiguous or in noisy environments.
“You don't always wait to get the input to actually assign meaning,” said Swaab. “When we are communicating, especially when you can see me and my gestures, you may already have some prediction of my next word. If somebody hesitates, then often the listener will fill in the words, and we do that because we bring a lot of knowledge and experience to communication.”
Swaab has also expanded her research to examining how experience speaking more than one language shapes prediction and language comprehension in the brain.
A new future in cognitive science
Swaab recently accepted a new position as professor of brain, language & cognition at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., where she will expand her research while maintaining her affiliation with UC Davis as a professor emerita.
Swaab said that across her career at UC Davis, her work has been possible through the relationships she built in the Center for Mind and Brain and through Academic Affairs faculty work-life balance initiatives she helped develop.
She has also served in leadership roles for international scientific societies and journals, most recently as 2020-2025 editor-in-chief of the field-leading journal Cognition.
“My path to understanding more about cognition, memory and attention has been really possible because the interdisciplinary interactions that the Center for Mind and Brain was founded to make possible,” she said. “We're not just little pillars of knowledge in one area. We're trying to interact and understand more, and I think that has been incredibly important.”
The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, or Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in Dutch, was founded in 1752, and is the oldest learned society in the Netherlands. Its mission is to advance scholarship across the sciences and humanities and to promote meaningful engagement between science and society.
Swaab will attend the new member induction ceremony in the Netherlands on March 30th.
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