Mara Breen awarded 2026 Faculty Award for Scholarship

Mara Breen is a phenomenal cognitive neuroscientist who studies prosody, the music of language. She investigates the ways that stresses and emphases shape how we parse and understand spoken and written language. Mara’s work on the “voice in your head” shows how readers make sense of language on the page, allowing us to internally hear the difference when a word like content carries different meanings in different contexts. The content of Mara’s work focuses on how the mind hears rhythm and meaning in language. But Mara is never content with a job well done; she is always pushing her work toward new questions and deeper discoveries.

Across the board, Mara’s studies are creative, original, and wide-reaching in their impact as they span the fields of linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and literacy studies. Her work has been supported by major grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and private foundations. Mara’s current research is an ambitious multi-year study examining the brain activity of children as they read “The Cat in the Hat,” a children’s book famous and well-loved for its musical rhyming and complex metrical structure.

At Ted’s House in Springfield, where Seuss first learned to read,
with caps catching brainwaves from children at speed,
Mara follows the rhyme, the rhythm, the beat
to learn how young minds make silent words speak.

Mara’s prolific publication record has earned her international recognition, reflected in frequent invitations to present at conferences and university colloquia. She is regularly called on to review federal grants and serve as an editor and reviewer for leading journals. Mara is also regarded as an important pipeline from Mount Holyoke to graduate school. Faculty across the country regularly reach out to her to recruit from the remarkable community of undergraduate researchers she mentors.

Another of Mara’s most significant achievements is her mentorship of an extraordinary number of undergraduate research assistants over the years. Her lab integrates students from psychology, philosophy and neuroscience as they work collaboratively from design and data collection to analysis, presentation, and publication. She has co-authored many papers and conference presentations with her students, and she continues to mentor them long after they graduate and pursue advanced study. She is a role model for those who work alongside her in her dedication to first-rate science conducted with student colleagues.

In both the classroom and the lab, Mara is a beloved teacher and mentor known for challenging her students to do more than they thought possible. She invests deeply in their intellectual and professional development by holding them to high standards while supporting them every step of the way. Students eagerly line up each term to try to get into Mara’s classes for a chance to learn from her greatness. Her passion for teaching is contagious, and her classroom energy is powerful enough to bring students to their feet, as one class quite literally ended the semester with a standing ovation. Even when teaching over one hundred students in a course, Mara has the rare ability to make each student feel personally seen and connected.

Mara Breen is an outstanding researcher, teacher, mentor, and colleague. We recognize her excellence as a scholar and educator by presenting her with the Meribeth E. Cameron Faculty Award for Scholarship.