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Barbara Shinn-Cunningham joined Carnegie Mellon University in 2018 as the founding director and was appointed Glen de Vries Dean of the Mellon College of Science in 2025. Before joining Carnegie Mellon, she spent twenty years as a faculty member at Boston University, specializing in Cognitive Neural Systems and Biomedical Engineering. Her innovative work in auditory neuroscience has been recognized by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation, and the Vannevar Bush Fellows program. She has held numerous elected and appointed leadership positions in professional organizations, including the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and the Acoustical Society of America, and serves on various advisory boards in academia and industry. Dr. Shinn-Cunningham's research focuses on understanding how the brain mechanisms allow individuals to make sense of speech sounds amidst ordinary social settings, aiding listeners with hearing impairments through novel assistive communication devices and technologies that leverage her knowledge of auditory neuroscience.
Admission is extremely competitive with no strict GPA cut-offs; holistic review is used.