Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

Biography

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

Before joining CMU, Shinn-Cunningham spent 21 years on the faculty of Boston University. Her research combines behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational methods to understand how the brain processes sound. An author of more than 200 scientific articles, she is recognized for her expertise in spatial hearing, auditory attention and sensory hearing deficits. She 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 in 2019, she accepted its 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. Her mentorship has been recognized by awards from both the ASA and the Society for Neuroscience. 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.

Fun Facts

Dean Shinn-Cunningham is an accomplished saber fencer having earned a team bronze medal for the U.S. in the 2019 Veteran World Championships in Cairo, Egypt. She also plays the oboe and English horn.