Julie Elie, an associate project scientist in Neuroscience faculty member Frédéric Theunissen’s lab, has won the 2026 Coller Dolittle Prize for Two-way Interspecies Communication for her work decoding zebra finch vocalizations. The $100,000 prize is awarded annually for the most promising research towards the development of an algorithm for communication with animals by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University.
Elie and her team combined over a decade of detailed behavioral observations with machine learning to classify zebra finch vocalizations into categories or “core words” based on their meaning, and then verified that those categories could be distinguished by the birds. When the birds made mistakes, they were more likely to confuse calls that had similar meanings rather than those that sounded similar, indicating that they understood the meaning of the calls.
Read more from the Coller Foundation.
Additional Information
- A scientist deciphered zebra finches’ vocabulary—and used it to talk back to them Scientific American, June 26, 2026
- A little bird told her: scientist wins $100,000 prize for decoding birdsong The Guardian, June 26, 2026
- Finch chirps are more than mindless chatter. They actually convey meaning. UC Berkeley News, November 4, 2025