Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mounya Elhilali, has been named the Whiting School’s Charles Renn Faculty Scholar.
Faculty Scholar awards serve an important function at WSE by providing five years of support to young faculty while they are building their research program. Elhilali, who is affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing and who directs the Laboratory for Computational Audio Perception, researches the neural and computational bases of sound and speech perception in complex acoustic environments. She has a particular interest in the robust representation of sensory information in noisy soundscapes, problems of auditory scene analysis and segregation, and the role of top-down adaptive processes of attention, expectations and contextual information in guiding sound perception. Collaborating and moving easily across disciplines,Elhilali adapts tools for multidisciplinary purposes, often in unexpected ways. Her work considers problems from multiple directions including the use of mathematical models, behavioral testing of human listeners and neural recordings of brain activity.
The Charles Renn Faculty Scholar award is sponsored by Whiting School Advisory Board member George Sykes ’91 and his wife, Elsa, to honor Elsa’s grandfather, Charles Renn, a distinguished faculty member at Johns Hopkins from 1946 until 1970 in the Department of Sanitary Engineering, later renamed the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. Charles Renn, who passed way in 2009, was a noted JHU biologist and an expert on water pollution and waste management control and was one of the early and significant investigators into the biological aspects of water pollution.