Espy-Wilson, Carol
The Institute for Systems Research
Carol Espy-Wilson is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland. View or download Dr. Espy-Wilson's CV here.
Dr. Espy-Wilson received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She received her M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, Dr. Espy-Wilson was a faculty member at Boston University.
Dr. Espy-Wilson's research is in speech communication. She combines knowledge of digital signal processing, speech science, linguistics, acoustic phonetics and machine learning to conduct interdisciplinary research in speech and speaker recognition, speech production, speech enhancement and single-channel speech segregation. She also analyzes speech as a behavioral signal for emotion recognition, sentiment analysis and the detection and monitoring of mental health.
Her company, OmniSpeech, translated research in her lab on noise suppression and speech enhancement to technology that improves speech-enabled technology in any device, app or platform.
Dr. Espy-Wilson has authored or coauthored numerous papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. She is a Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ICSA) and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of IEEE. She was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard 2008–2009. Among the other honors and awards she has received for her research contributions are the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship in 1990, the Independent Scientist Award from the National Institutes of Health in 1998 and the Honda Initiation Award in 2003. She served as the chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the Acoustical Society of America (2007-2010) and as an Associate Editor of the ASA's magazine, Acoustics Today. She was a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation at the National Institutes of Health. Currently, she is a member of the Advisory Council for the NIH National Institutes on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. In 2019 she chaired the NSF Speech for Robotics Workshop.
- Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (2021)
- Editorial Board, Computer, Speech and Language (2021–)
- Advisory Council, National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, NIH (2019-present)
- University of Maryland Campus Woman of Influence (2020)
- First African American woman, and first African American, in ECE to achieve tenure and be promoted to the rank of full professor (University of Maryland First to ADVANCE Program, 2019)
- Jimmy Lin Award for Innovation (2018)
- Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (2018)
- Associate Editor, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
- Advisory Council, NIH National Institutes on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (2015-2018)
- Institute for Systems Research Senior Faculty Fellow Award (2015-2017)
- Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award, University of Maryland (2012-2013)
- Advance Professor, University of Maryland (2011-2012)
- Elected to the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE (2010-2012)
- Invention of the Year Award, University of Maryland (2010)
- Maryland Innovator of the Year Award, Baltimore Daily Record (2010)
- Grand Prize, Rockville Economic Development Inc. (REDI) StartRight! Women’s Business Plan Competition, 2010
- $50,000 SAIC-VentureAccelerator Competition, 2010
- University of Maryland $75K Business Plan Competition (High Technology & Social Impact), 2010
- Invention of the Year (Information Science): OmniSpeech, 2010
- Chair, Speech Communication Technical Committee, Acoustical Society of America (2007-2010)
- Editorial Board, Acoustics Today, Acoustical Society of America (2007-2009)
- Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2008)
- Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (2005)
- Honda Initiation Award (2003)
- Honda Initiation Award (2004)
- Member, NIH Language and Communication Study Section (2001-2004)
- NIH Career Award (1998-2003)
- Clare Boothe Luce Professor (1990-1995)