Dr. Mounya Elhilali

Biography

Mounya Elhilali is the founder of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Laboratory for Computational Audio Perception (LCAP) at Johns Hopkins University. Her research advances the understanding of how the human brain and machines process the complexities of sound. Elhilali’s work bridges the gap between neuroscience and audio technologies by examining the computational neural bases of sound and speech perception in complex acoustic environments. By using mathematical signal processing models and behavioral testing, including psychoacoustics and neural recordings, she focuses on the decoding processes that guide human behavior, aiming to engineer efficient machines capable of parsing complex soundscapes. Her applications span medical, commercial, military, and robotic domains. Elhilali has explored how attention to sound provides feedback to brain networks, affecting how humans analyze and understand their acoustic surroundings. Her multidisciplinary research has created numerous insights into brain sciences, adaptive signal processing, and medical systems, including devising new diagnostic technologies that leverage body sounds to address public health problems such as pneumonia. She is affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins and is a senior member of IEEE, among other professional societies. Elhilali has received several prestigious awards for her contributions to education and research, including the Johns Hopkins University Catalyst Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.

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