Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
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Barbara Shinn-Cunningham is an American bioengineer and neuroscientist. She became the Glen de Vries Dean of the Mellon College of Science at
Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
(CMU) in 2025. Prior to this, she served as the founding director of CMU's Neuroscience Institute. At CMU, she is Professor of Auditory Neuroscience with appointments in the Neuroscience Institute, Psychology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering.


Education

Shinn-Cunningham attended
Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...
as an undergraduate, where she earned an Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering. She earned both her
master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...
and Ph.D. from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
in Electrical and Computer Engineering.


Career

Prior to moving to Carnegie Mellon, where Shinn-Cunningham runs the Laboratory in Multisensory Neuroscience, Shinn-Cunningham was a professor of Biomedical Engineering at
Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...
(BU). She worked at
Bell Communications Research iconectiv supplies communications providers with network planning and management services. The company’s cloud-based information as a service network and operations management and numbering solutions span trusted communications, digital identi ...
,
MIT Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...
, and Sensimetrics before joining the faculty at BU. She is an auditory neuroscientist best known for her work on
attention Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...
and the cocktail party problem,
sound localization Sound localization is a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance. The sound localization mechanisms of the mammalian auditory system have been extensively studied. The auditory system u ...
, and the effects of
room acoustics Room acoustics is a subfield of acoustics dealing with the behaviour of sound in enclosed or partially-enclosed spaces. The architectural details of a room influences the behaviour of sound waves within it, with the effects varying by frequency ...
and
reverberation In acoustics, reverberation (commonly shortened to reverb) is a persistence of sound after it is produced. It is often created when a sound is reflection (physics), reflected on surfaces, causing multiple reflections that build up and then de ...
on
hearing Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds through an organ, such as an ear, by detecting vibrations as periodic changes in the pressure of a surrounding medium. The academic field concerned with hearing is auditory sci ...
. Shinn-Cunningham's lab uses a range of techniques to understand
neural coding Neural coding (or neural representation) is a neuroscience field concerned with characterising the hypothetical relationship between the Stimulus (physiology), stimulus and the neuronal responses, and the relationship among the Electrophysiology, e ...
and
perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
, including
psychoacoustics Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound including noise, speech, ...
, cortical
electroencephalography Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignal, bio signals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons in ...
and
magnetoencephalography Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electric current, electrical currents occurring naturally in the human brain, brain, using very sensitive magn ...
,
functional near-infrared spectroscopy Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an optical brain monitoring technique which uses near-infrared spectroscopy for the purpose of functional neuroimaging. Using fNIRS, brain activity is measured by using near-infrared light to estima ...
,
pupillometry Pupillometry, the measurement of pupil size and reactivity, is a key part of the clinical neurological exam for patients with a wide variety of neurological injuries. It is also used in psychology. Pupillometry in critical care For more than 100 ...
, comparative neuroscience, and computational modeling. She also collaborates with researchers conducting
functional magnetic resonance imaging Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area o ...
and
neurophysiology Neurophysiology is a branch of physiology and neuroscience concerned with the functions of the nervous system and their mechanisms. The term ''neurophysiology'' originates from the Greek word ''νεῦρον'' ("nerve") and ''physiology'' (whic ...
. She is particularly interested in how sensory and cognitive processes work together to allow people to understand overlapping conversations. She has held numerous leadership positions in professional organizations, including as President and as Vice President of the
Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary org ...
, Treasurer and Member of Council of the
Association for Research in Otolaryngology The Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) is a professional association of researchers, including practitioners, teachers, and students, in the fields of otolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat), and especially including hearing. The ass ...
, and Chair of the AUD NIH study section. She regularly serves on advisory and review panels in academia and beyond. She has served as a Senior Editor for ''
eLife ''eLife'' is a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal, science publisher for the Biomedicine, biomedical and life sciences. It was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, ...
'' and on the editorial boards of the ''Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology'', the ''
Journal of Neurophysiology The ''Journal of Neurophysiology'' is a monthly Peer review, peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1938. It is published by the American Physiological Society with Jan "Nino" Ramirez as its editor-in-chief. Ramirez is the Director for ...
'', and ''Auditory Perception and Cognition''.


Awards

Shinn-Cunningham is a fellow of the
American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) is a non-profit organization founded in 1991, and headquartered in Washington, D.C. It represents 50,000 medical and Biomedical engineering, biomedical engineers, and academic i ...
and the
Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary org ...
(ASA). She has received fellowships from the
Whitaker Foundation The Whitaker Foundation was based in Arlington, Virginia and was an organization that primarily supported biomedical engineering education and research, but also supported other forms of medical research. It was founded and funded by U. A. Whitaker ...
, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows program (now known as the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Program). She was the recipient of the biennial Mentorship Award from the
Acoustical Society of America The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is an international scientific society founded in 1929 dedicated to generating, disseminating and promoting the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. The Society is primarily a voluntary org ...
in 2013. She was a member of the Telluride Auditory Attention Team that received the 2021 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering for their work to monitor auditory attentional selection through electroencephalography. She was the eighth woman to receive any
ASA Silver Medal The ASA Silver Medal is an award presented by the Acoustical Society of America to individuals, without age limitation, for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles o ...
and the first to receive the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal (2019), 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." In 2020, she was recognized by the
Society for Neuroscience The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is a professional society, headquartered in Washington, D.C., for basic scientists and physicians around the world whose research is focused on the study of the brain and nervous system. It is especially well k ...
as a recipient of the Bernice Grafstein Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Mentoring. She is a Lifetime National Associate of the National Research Council of the
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...
.


Personal life

Shinn-Cunningham is married to Robert Kevin Cunningham, an engineer-scientist who has worked in machine learning, computational vision, and cybersecurity. They have two sons, Nick and Will, born in 1994 and 1996 respectively. She took up saber fencing as an adult. As a member of the 2019 US Veteran Team, she participated in the World Veteran Fencing Championships in Cairo, Egypt, where she was a member of the bronze medal-winning US Women's Saber Team and placed seventh in the individual Women Vet50 category. She is an avid oboist and English horn player.


Selected publications

*Deng, Y, I Choi, B Shinn-Cunningham (2020). "Topographic specificity of alpha power during auditory spatial attention," Neuroimage, 207, 116360. *Michalka SW, L Kong, ML Rosen, BG Shinn-Cunningham, DC Somers(2015). "Short-term memory for space and time flexibly recruit complementary sensory-biased frontal lobe attention networks," Neuron, 87, 882–892. *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 (2012). "Why middle-aged listeners have trouble hearing in everyday settings," Current Biology, 22, 1417–1422. *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 nvited submission for special issue on Auditory Scene Analysis 12, 283–299. *Shinn-Cunningham BG, N Kopco, TJ Martin (2005). "Localizing nearby sound sources in a classroom: Binaural room impulse responses," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America," 117, 3100-3115. *Durlach NI, CR Mason, G Kidd Jr, TL Arbogast, HS Colburn and BG Shinn-Cunningham (2003). "Note on informational masking," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America," 113, 2984–2987.


References


External links


Google Scholar citation linkPersonal web page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shinn-Cunningham, Barbara Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Carnegie Mellon University faculty Brown University School of Engineering alumni Fellows of the Acoustical Society of America Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering MIT Lincoln Laboratory people MIT School of Engineering alumni Sloan Research Fellows