Prof. Dr. Heriberto Avelino

Heriberto Avelino is a guest in 2025. Heriberto is a researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, in Mexico. He received master's and doctoral degrees in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

He has been a professor of regular courses at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, University of Toronto. He has been invited to give courses and seminars at other universities around the world such as the Higher Council for Scientific Research and the Menéndez Pelayo International University, Uppsala University, Leiden University, Leipzig University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Concepción University, Chile, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, of Sonora, among others. He was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Heriberto has done research and fieldwork in Mexico, the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon, Borneo (Indonesia) and the Southeastern United States, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, among others. His research has been funded by prestigious organizations such as DFG, MEXUS, Fullbright and CONACYT, among others. His lines of research include cognitive neurosciences and language documentation of endangered languages, indigenous languages in the international diaspora.

He is the author of about twenty research articles, including "Left hemisphere processing of tone and selective attention in Yalálag Zapotec", "Neural correlates to a three way contrast of duration in speech and non-speech stimuli" and "The ecology of variation and change in the context of language attrition". He is the author of a Trilingual Zapotec-English-Spanish dictionary. He is editor of the books "New Perspectives in Mayan Linguistics" and "Laryngeal Features in Languages of the Americas." He is the chief editor of the book series Studies of Amerindian Linguistics from the Language Science Press (Berlin). He has delivered keynote addresses at Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, University of New Mexico, and Uppsala University.

His research at the MPI-MMG will delve on Language, Migration, and Superdiversity, focusing on indigenous immigrants from Mexico.