Abeer Alwan received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1992. Since then, she has been with the ECE department at UCLA where she is now a Distinguished Professor and directs the Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory (http://www.seas.ucla.edu/spapl/).

Dr. Alwan’s research interests are in the areas of speech production and perception modeling and applications to speech technology such as automatic speech recognition, speaker identification and text-to-speech synthesis. Her focus is on limited data or low-resource systems where knowledge of speech production and perception, and linguistics can be critical to system performance. Current projects include detecting depression from speech signals, children’s speech recognition, speaker recognition with limited data, and the recognition of low-resource dialects such as the African-American dialect. She is the recipient of several awards including the NSF Research Initiation and Career Awards, NIH FIRST Award, UCLA-TRW Excellence in Teaching Award, Okawa Foundation Award in Telecommunication, and the Engineer’s Council Educator Award. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, and International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, co-Editor in Chief of Speech Communication, and Associate Editor of both JASA and IEEE TSALP.