Dr. Bernstein is Head of the Communication Neuroscience Department. She directs a program of research on human speech and non-speech perception and neural processing. Her research areas include phonetic perception via vision, hearing, and touch; lipreading and spoken word recognition in deaf and hearing adults; multisensory processing and plasticity in individuals with normal hearing and with hearing loss; and development of synthetic visible speech.
For more information see here.

Academic Affiliations: Academic Affiliations: Adjunct Professor
Psychology Department, University of Southern California
Neuroscience Graduate Department, University of Southern California

Dr. Jiang's research is in the areas of audiovisual speech processing and perception, signal processing, and speech recognition by humans and machines. He is exploring questions about how humans perceive acoustic speech signals in combination with watching the talker's face and/or their hand gesture cues. He is also using his engineering knowledge to analyze acoustic and optical speech stimuli and to develop artificial talking heads and/or hand gestures. Dr. Jiang received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2003.
For more information see here.

Brian Chaney is the Senior Software Engineer responsible for developing and maintaining the many custom software programs on which the research program relies. In recent years, a focus of his work has been the development of software for generating speech and non-speech stimuli stored on DVD. Brian Chaney is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology.

John Jordan designs and fabricates custom hardware that is essential to the research program. His work has resulted in numerous sound and mechanical vibration transducers, including ones for use in the magnetic resonance (MR) imaging environment. John Jordan is a graduate of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Ewen Chao is the Department's Laboratory Manager and Administrative Assistant. Her contribution includes managing the recruitment of human subjects, data archiving, and day-to-day business. She is involved in projects to archive the large quantity of video speech data that has been acquired in the course of the research program. Ewen Chao is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Aronoff's research explores the mechanisms listeners use to deal with noisy environments.  His work focuses on the influence of vision, touch, and experience on auditory perception.  He is currently investigating disorders of the auditory pathway, including auditory neuropathy, that result in difficulty with perception in noise.  Dr. Aronoff received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 2007.

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