Barbara Shinn-Cunningham’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham (born 1964) is Director of the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute and a Professor of Psychology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering. Prior to moving to Carnegie Mellon, where she runs the Laboratory in Multisensory Neuroscience, she was a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University (BU). She attended Brown University as an undergraduate, where she earned an Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering. She earned both her master’s degree and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She worked at Bell Communications Research, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Sensimetrics before joining the faculty at BU. She is an auditory neuroscientist best known for her work on attention and the cocktail party problem, sound localization, and the effects of room acoustics and reverberation on hearing.

Her lab uses a range of techniques to understand neural coding and perception, including psychoacoustics, cortical electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography, brainstem frequency following responses, and computational modeling. She also collaborates with researchers conducting functional magnetic resonance imaging and neurophysiology. She is particularly interested in ‘hidden hearing loss’, the trouble people with otherwise normal hearing have in decoding overlapping conversations.

She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). She has received fellowships from the Whitaker Foundation, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows program, and the mentorship award from the Acoustical Society of America. She is the eighth woman to receive any ASA Silver Medal and the first to receive the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal, which she was awarded in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics, Speech Communication, and Architectural Acoustics “for contributions to understanding the perceptual, cognitive, and neural bases of speech perception in complex acoustic environments.” She has held leadership positions in numerous professional organizations, including as Vice President of the Acoustical Society of America and Chair of the AUD NIH study section. She has also served on the editorial boards for various journals, including eLife, the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and Auditory Perception and Cognition. She is a Lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science. She also serves or has served on numerous advisory panels in academia and beyond.

Selected publications

• Bharadwaj HM, S Verhulst, L Shaheen, MC Liberman, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2014). “Cochlear neuropathy and the coding of supra-threshold sound,” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2014.00026.
• Ruggles D, H Bharadwaj, and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2011). “Normal hearing is not enough to guarantee robust encoding of suprathreshold features important in everyday communication”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 15516-15521.
• Shinn-Cunningham, BG (2008). “Object-based auditory and visual attention,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 182-186.
• Shinn-Cunningham, B and V Best (2008). “Selective attention in normal and impaired hearing,” Trends in Amplification [invited submission for special issue on Auditory Scene Analysis], 12, 283-299.