ECE FACULTY

Carol Y. Espy-Wilson

Title: Professor
Areas/Affiliations: ECE, ISR
E-mail: espy@umd.edu
Phone: (301)405-7411
Office: A.V. Williams 2221
Recent News

Biography:

Carol Espy-Wilson received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1979. She received her M.S., E.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1981, 1984 and 1987, respectively. She was on faculty at Boston University from 1990 to 2001 and is Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She directs the Speech Communication Lab at UMD.

Notably, Dr. Espy-Wilson is the recipient of the University of Maryland's 2012-2013 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher award. She is one of six professors to receive this award and the tenth ECE professor to garner this distinction. She is also the receipient of the NSF Minority Initiation Award (1990-1992), the Clare Booth Luce Professorship (1990-1995) the NIH Independent Scientist Award (1998-2003), the Honda Initiation Award (2004-2005), and a Radcliffe Fellowship (2008).

Dr. Espy-Wilson is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and a Senior Member of IEEE.  She served as  Chair of the Speech Technical Committee of the ASA from 2007 to 2010, as an associate editor of the ASA's magazine, Acoustics Today, and as an appointed member of the Language and Communication Study Section at NIH, 2001-2004.  Currently, she is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, an elected member of the Speech and Language Technical Committee of IEEE and a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation Research at NIH.

Research Interests:

Professor Espy-Wilson's research interests include the integration of engineering, linguistics and speech acoustics to study speech communication. She is developing an approach to speech recognition based on phonetic features, articulatory parameters and landmarks to better address variability in the speech signal. She also conducts research in the areas of speech production, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, single-channel speaker separation and language and genre detection in audio content analysis and forensics. A major focus of her research is to gain a better understanding of the relationship between articulation, acoustics and perception and to use this knowledge to develop effective speech technologies. Prof. Espy-Wilson heads the Speech Communication Lab where postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students perform research. Her research has been largely supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.  Professor Espy-Wilson teaches the undergraduate courses Numerical Techniques in Engineering (ENEE 241), Signals and Systems (ENEE 322), Digital Signal Processing (ENEE 425), and the advanced graduate level course, Speech and Audio Processing, ENEE 632.

↑ Back to Top