Berrak Sisman

Berrak Sisman is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a member of the AI-X Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship. She is a member of JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing and the JHU Data Science and AI Institute. She is the Director of the Smile Lab at JHU. She is internationally recognized for her contributions to deep learning, speech synthesis, voice conversion and expressive speech modeling. She is also interested in medical applications of speech and language as well as deepfake detection and anti-spoofing.

Sisman received her PhD from the National University of Singapore, advised by Haizhou Li, with visiting research appointments at the University of Edinburgh and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST, Japan). Before joining Johns Hopkins, she was a tenure-track faculty member at the University of Texas at Dallas (2022–2024). She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the NSF CAREER Award (2024), Amazon Faculty Award (2022), Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 Award (2021) and A*STAR Singapore International Graduate Award (2016 – 2020).

Sisman’s leadership extends beyond her research contributions, with active and notable involvement in organizing key conferences and technical committees. She has been elected as a member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2022 – 2024; 2025 – 2027). She is an Associate Editor at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. She is one of the Technical Program Chairs for Interspeech 2026 and the General Co-chair for Interspeech 2028. She is elected to the ISCA Board (2025–2028), where she oversees ISCA’s grants.