Carnegie Mellon University

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

Dr. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

Director, Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute
George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Auditory Neuroscience, Biomedical Engineering, Psychology, and Electrical & Computer Engineering

  • Baker Hall 335A
Address
Baker Hall 335A
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Education

  • Sc.B., Electrical Engineering, magna cum laude, Brown University, 1986

  • M.S., Electrical & Computer Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988

  • Ph.D., Electrical & Computer Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994

Bio

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham became the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute in 2018. Before joining Carnegie Mellon, she spent over twenty years on the faculty of Boston University (first in Cognitive and Neural Systems, and later in Biomedical Engineering). Her innovative work in auditory neuroscience has been recognized by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation, and the Vannevar Bush Fellows program. She has held numerous elected and appointed leadership positions in professional organizations such as the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and the Acoustical Society of America, and serves as on numerous advisory boards within both academia and industry.

Research

How do we make sense of speech and other sounds, given the cacophony reaching our ears in ordinary social settings? What brain networks allow us to focus attention and suppress uninteresting sound? Can we develop new assistive communication devices and technologies that leverage  knowledge from auditory neuroscience to aid listeners with hearing impairment or other communication disorders? Dr. Shinn-Cunningham's research uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to understand auditory processing, from how sound is encoded in the inner ear to how cognitive networks modulate the representation of auditory information in the brain.

Research Interests: auditory attention in normal and special populations; binaural and spatial hearing; subcortical and cortical sound processing; multi-sensory attention networks

  

bshinn-cunningham research pic

Awards and Recognitions

  • Women in Acoustics Named Luncheon Honoree, Acoustical Society of America, 2017
  • Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, 2016
  • Mentorship Award, Student Council of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013
  • Fellow, Acoustical Society of America, 2009
  • Associate Member of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, 2008
  • National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow, 2008
  • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience, 2000
  • Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Fellow, 1999