It is our distinct pleasure to announce that this year’s Paul Bertelson Award is awarded to Dr. Joshua Snell. The awardee recommenders, Jan Theeuwes and Marc Brysbaert and the Award committee, comprising the entire Executive committee of ESCoP agree that Joshua Snell is a leading early-career scientist whose work has reshaped theoretical and computational accounts of reading. His influential publications in Psychological Review, Psychological Science, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, demonstrate exceptional originality and impact. He has received major competitive funding (Marie Skłodowska-Curie, ERC Starting Grant, NWO Vidi) and bridges fundamental theory with applied research on reading impairments. His strong commitment to open science further amplifies his influence. Together, these achievements make him a compelling and highly deserving candidate for the Bertelson Award. We are looking forward to what announces to be an exciting keynote lecture at the next year’s 25th ESCoP conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Joshua Snell is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he leads the Snell Language Lab. His research investigates how the human brain processes written language, combining eye-tracking, EEG, computational modelling, and behavioural experiments.
Snell’s work has advanced understanding of how readers process multiple words simultaneously and how attention, memory, and language interact during reading. His research has been published in leading journals, including Cognition, Cortex, and Psychological Review, where he has introduced influential theoretical and computational models of visual word recognition.
In 2024, Snell was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for the TAPIR project (Tests and Applications of a Peripheral Interference theory of Reading). In 2025 he received a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to investigate ways to preserve reading ability in people with macular degeneration, translating fundamental insights into practical interventions for visual impairment.