Barbara Shinn-Cunningham is an American bioengineer and neuroscientist. She is the founding Director of the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute, the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Auditory Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering.

Education

Shinn-Cunningham attended Brown University 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 an 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 practice.

and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

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. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with ...

(BU). She worked at

Bell Communications Research iconectiv is a supplier of network planning and network management services to telecommunications providers. Known as Bellcore after its establishment in the United States in 1983 as part of the break-up of the Bell System, the company's name ...

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 and the

cocktail party problem The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of the brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, such as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room ...

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 us ...

, 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 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 audit ...

. 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 and the individual or ensemble neuronal responses and the relationship among the electrical activit ...

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 system ...

, including

psychoacoustics Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of sound perception and audiology—how humans perceive various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated wi ...

, cortical electroencephalography and

magnetoencephalography Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain, using very sensitive magnetometers. Arrays of SQUIDs (s ...

, brainstem frequency following responses, and computational modeling. She also collaborates with researchers conducting functional magnetic resonance imaging and

neurophysiology Neurophysiology is a branch of physiology and neuroscience that studies nervous system function rather than nervous system architecture. This area aids in the diagnosis and monitoring of neurological diseases. Historically, it has been dominated b ...

. She is particularly interested in "hidden hearing loss", the trouble people with otherwise normal hearing have in decoding overlapping conversations. She has held numerous leadership positions in professional organizations, including 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 is a professional association of researchers, including practitioners, teachers, and students, in the fields of otolaryngology (ear, nose, and throat), and especially including hearing. Journal JARO ...

, and Chair of the AUD NIH study section. She regularly serves on advisory and review panels in academia and beyond. She is a Senior Editor for ''

eLife ''eLife'' is a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences. It was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust, following a w ...

'', and has served 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-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 the Center fo ...

'', 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. It represents 50,000 medical and biomedical engineers, and academic institutions, private industry, ...

and the

(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. Whitake ...

, 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

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, DC, 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 kn ...

as a recipient of the Bernice Grafstein Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Mentoring. She is a Lifetime National Associate of the

National Research Council National Research Council may refer to: * National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development * National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome * National Research Council (United States), part of ...

of the National Academy of Sciences.

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.

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 Boston 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