Congratulations to one of our most most distinguished alums, Barbara Hall Partee (PhD 1965), Professor emerita at UMass Amherst — a winner of the 2020 Franklin medal awarded by the Franklin Institute. In the citation accompanying the award, Barbara is hailed for “her foundational contributions that synthesize insights from linguistics, philosophy, logic, and psychology to understand how words and sentences combine to express meaning in humanlanguage”. The list of previous award winners includes Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Rudolf Diesel, Pierre and Marie Curie, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Frank Lloyd Wright and more people you have heard of than we can list here!
Barbara was a member of the very first PhD class at MIT Linguistics and is rightly considered a founder of the field of formal semantics within linguistics.
award: https://www.fi.edu/laureates/barbara-partee
homepage: https://people.umass.edu/partee/
dissertation: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/13005