Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham is the Glen de Vries Dean of Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She joined the university in 2018 as the founding director of the Neuroscience Institute and holds courtesy appointments in Psychology, Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Before joining CMU, Shinn-Cunningham spent 21 years at Boston University. Her research combines behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to understand how the brain processes sound. She is recognized for her expertise in spatial hearing, auditory attention and sensory hearing deficits and has degrees in electrical engineering from Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has received honors from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation and the Vannevar Bush Fellows program.

Shinn-Cunningham is the president of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and received its 2019 Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics, Speech Communication, and Architectural Acoustics. She previously served as the treasurer/secretary of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. She is a Fellow of the ASA, a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a lifetime member of the National Research Council. She serves as a senior editor for eLife.