Barbara Shinn-Cunningham

Barbara G Shinn-Cunningham
Fields	auditory neuroscience, hearing science, electrical engineering, cognitive neuroscience
Institutions	Boston University
Alma mater	Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Barbara Shinn-Cunningham (born 1964) is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University (BU). She attended Brown University as an undergraduate, where she earned an Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering. She earned both her master's degree and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She worked at Bell Communications Research, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 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, sound localization, and the effects of room acoustics and reverberation on hearing.

Her lab uses a range of techniques to understand neural coding and perception, including psychoacoustics, cortical electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography, brainstem frequency following responses, and computational modeling. She also collaborates with researchers conducting functional magnetic resonance imaging and neurophysiology. She is particularly interested in 'hidden hearing loss', the trouble people with otherwise normal hearing have in decoding overlapping conversations.