Meet Our Team

Michael G. Heinz is a Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences and of Biomedical Engineering. Mike is a native of Baltimore, MD and grew up sailing on Chesapeake Bay. He received an Sc.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from Brown University in 1992. He then completed a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 1994, where he performed psychoacoustical experiments measuring the ability of human listeners to detect signals in noise (with Craig Formby and Moise Goldstein). In 2000, he received a Ph.D. from the MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in the area of Speech and Hearing Sciences (mentor: Laurel Carney). His dissertation involved computational and theoretical modeling to quantify the amount of information in auditory-nerve responses for psychoacoustical tasks. His post-doctoral work was in Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (mentor: Eric Young), where his work evaluated possible neural correlates of loudness recruitment by comparing neurophysiological responses from single auditory-nerve fibers in animals with normal hearing and noise-induced hearing loss. In 2005, he joined the faculty at Purdue as an Assistant Professor, where he and his lab members have been investigating the relation between neurophysiological and perceptual responses to sound with normal and impaired hearing through the coordinated use of neurophysiology, computational modeling, and psychoacoustics. He teaches courses in both SLHS and BME. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) "for contributions to understanding the relation between physiology and psychophysics in hearing" and served as Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics from 2011-2014. In 2016, he was chosen as a University Faculty Scholar, and in 2021 he received the Career Research Award from the College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue. He currently serves as the Director of an NIH-funded (T32) Interdisciplinary Training Program in Auditory Neuroscience (TPAN) and serves as the Associate Head for Research in SLHS. He also serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (JARO).

Professor Grama's research interests span the areas of parallel and distributed computing architectures, algorithms, and applications. His work on distributed infrastructure deals with development of software support for dynamic clustered and multiclustered environments. More recent work has focused on resource location and allocation mechanisms in peer-to-peer networks. His research on applications has focused on particle dynamics methods, their applications to dense linear system solvers, and fast algorithms for data compression and analysis. Professor Grama has authored several papers and co-authored a textbook Introduction to Parallel Computing: Design and Analysis of Algorithms with Vipin Kumar, Anshul Gupta, and George Karypis. He is a member of American Association for Advancement of Sciences and Sigma Xi.

Samantha is from Las Vegas, Nevada, but has lived in many different corners of the US for school. After graduating with a degree in biology from the University of Chicago in 2013, she entered the world of clinical audiology. She was introduced to hearing research through an NIH T35 traineeship during her AuD program. Working with Dr. Ram Ramachandran, she studied the neural correlates of tone detection and noise and the effects of acoustic overexposure on nonhuman primates. Sam received her Doctor of Audiology (AuD) from Vanderbilt University in 2018 after completing her 4th year externship at Yale University's Hearing and Balance Center. She stayed in Connecticut following graduation and worked for three years as a clinical audiologist at Easterseals' Center for Better Hearing. Sam joined the Speech, Language, and Hearing Science PhD program at Purdue in the fall of 2021 and is working with both Dr. Michael Heinz and Dr. Hari Bharadwaj. She is excited to link her clinical experience to auditory neuroscience to better understand the effects of noise exposure on the auditory system and to improve diagnostic measures of hearing impairment. When not in the lab, Sam enjoys starting and never finishing new crafts, riding the Peloton bike, watching Criminal Minds, and listening to music.

Jaewoo Shin is a computational scientist at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) at Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2019, where he worked on high-performance computing and parallel algorithms. His research interests include parallel computing, distributed systems, and data analytics. At RCAC, Jaewoo provides support for researchers in using high-performance computing resources and developing efficient algorithms for large-scale data analysis.