Dear Members of the Carnegie Mellon Community,
We are excited to announce the establishment of a new university-wide institute that will take advantage of Carnegie Mellon’s distinctive intellectual strengths and interdisciplinary approach to propel brain science to a new level.
The institute, which will join several brain science initiatives under one umbrella, will be led by renowned auditory neuroscientist Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, who has been appointed director of the institute. Barbara is currently the director of Boston University’s Center for Research in Sensory Communication and Emerging Neural Technology (CRESCENT) and has been on BU’s faculty since 1997.
Barbara built her research career around applying math and engineering approaches to perception, specifically hearing and speech. She is best known for her spatial hearing work on the “cocktail party problem,” which looks at how the brain uses attention to block out certain sounds and pay attention to others.
Bringing together our existing programs in neuroscience, this new institute will supercharge work in traditional fields such as biological sciences and psychology, as well as deepen connections to Carnegie Mellon’s core strengths in engineering and computation. This unified approach will build on the momentum our scholars and researchers have created, contributing new resources and leadership to solve of some of the brain’s biggest mysteries.
Current neuroscience initiatives and programs at CMU, including BrainHub and the joint CMU/University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), will form the foundation for the new institute that will be jointly run by the Dietrich College and Mellon College of Science. I am grateful to the faculty members who have nurtured our leadership in neuroscience, including Alison Barth, professor of biological sciences, who has led BrainHub as its interim faculty director since 2015, and Rob Kass, the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience, who has served as CMU leadership of the CNBC, also since 2015.
We are pleased to welcome Barbara to the university and look forward to the future of brain science at CMU.
Regards,
Laurie R. Weingart
Interim Provost
Richard M. and Margaret S. Cyert Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory