Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and serves as the inaugural Vice President for Presidential Initiaitives on the Senior Leadership Team of USC’s President. He is a Professor in the Signal and Image Processing Institute of USC’s Ming Hsieh Electrical & Computer Engineering department with joint appointments as Professor in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. He is also the inaugural director of the Ming Hsieh Institute, a Research Director for the Information Sciences Institute at USC and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. He held the inaugural Viterbi Professorship in Engineering at USC (2007-2016). He was also a Research Area Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center at USC, and was the Research Principal for the USC Pratt and Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering, a unique partnership between academia and industry (2003-2007).

Shri Narayanan received the Engineer’s Council 2015 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award, and was selected as IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-2011, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16, and the 2017 Willard R. Zemlin Memorial Lecturer for American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA). Shri Narayanan has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Okawa Research Award, IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2010), Google Faculty Research Award (2016), Amazon Research Award (2020), the 2011 UCLA Engineering Alumni Professional Achievement Award, a 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award from College of Engineering – Guindy (India). Shri Narayanan has also been recognized at USC for his research, service and mentoring including with a USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, a faculty fellowship for Interdisciplinary research, USC Viterbi Engineering Junior and Senior Research Awards and Use-inspired research award, USC Electrical Engineering Northrop-Grumman Research award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, and a USC Distinguished Faculty Service Award from the Academic Senate.

Dr. Guenther is one of the foremost researchers in the world on computational and cognitive neuroscience. His research focuses primarily on the neural computations underlying speech, including characterization of the neural bases of communication disorders and development of brain–computer interfaces for communication restoration.

Dr. Guenther holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri where he graduated summa cum laude and was ranked first overall in the College of Engineering. He received an M.S. in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University.

In 2010 he became associate director of the graduate program for neuroscience and director of the computational neuroscience PhD specialization at Boston University. He joined the Department of Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences at BU that same year. Since 1998 he has been a member of the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology PhD program in the Harvard University – MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and since 2003 he has been a visiting scientist in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Guenther has authored over 55 articles concerning the neural bases of speech and motor control as well as brain–computer interface technology.

He is currently a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences and biomedical engineering at Boston University.