Institute Steering Committee Member Barbara Shinn-Cunningham’s Work Profiled by BU Research
Institute Steering Committee member Barbara Shinn-Cunningham’s research is pushing the limit of understanding how our brains make sense of sound. After receiving a grant from Harvard Medical School grant for $100,000 in 2015, she’s spent the last year exploring “hidden hear loss,” the trouble many people with “normal” hearing have deciphering competing, overlapping sounds, such as a conversation in a crowded room, also known as the Cocktail Party Effect. She is currently working with her lab team to diagnose and treat hidden hearing loss by developing a “directional hearing aid” that will alleviate hidden hearing loss by being more selective with what sounds are amplified.
Shinn-Cunningham calls hidden hearing loss “the most important discovery in hearing research that I have seen in my career.”
Barbara Shinn Cunningham is a professor in the Biomedical Engineering department at the Engineering School and the Director at the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology at Boston University. She received an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Math from Brown University as well as a Masters and graduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She’s served as a Hariri Institute for Computing Steering Committee Member since 2011.