The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation announced the six winners of its 2023 Georg Forster Research Awards last Wednesday, naming Moroccan linguist Abdelhadi Soudi as one of the six selected researchers.
The six winners will each receive a prize from the foundation valued at 60,000 Euros. The prizes are funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Soudi, a full professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Rabat (ENSMR) at its linguistic and communication center, is also an Advisory Board Member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In addition to receiving a cash prize, Soudi will collaborate with colleagues from the University of Siegen’s Ubiquitous Computing research department.
Soudi edited and contributed to two books, “Arabic Computational Morphology” and “Challenges for Arabic Machine Translation.” He has won several prizes such as the “German African Innovation Incentive Prize,” the “2020 Prix Germano-Africain d’Encouragement à l’Innovation,” and the USA National Science Foundation’s “Software Helps Deaf and Hearing Communities Interact, in US and Abroad.”
Soudi is working on developing assistive devices to empower and help with the integration of deaf and hard of hearing students.
The researcher has participated in numerous conferences and was an invited speaker at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s 8th forum on the internationalization of sciences and humanities in Germany in 2014.
The other five prize-winning researchers include Achille Ephrem Assogbadjo (an agronomist) from Benin, Andrea Verónica Bragas (a physicist) from Argentina, Maristella Svampa (a sociologist) from Argentina, Igor Olegovich Fritsky (a chemist) from Ukraine, and Louis Cloete Jonker (a theologian) from S. Africa.
Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation gathers around 2,000 scholars from throughout the world to study and do research in Germany. The Foundation maintains an interdisciplinary network of over 30,000 Humboldtians in over 140 countries, among them 59 Nobel laureates.
The Georg Forster Research Award recognizes researchers from developing and transition countries who have earned international recognition for their research work and for seeking to solve development-related issues. The award winners are nominated by specialist colleagues from Germany and are invited to establish or expand collaborative projects with them.