MS/ PhD Student Gavin Mischler Receives NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

By
ELIESE LISSNER
April 16, 2021

EE MS/ PhD student Gavin Mischler received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Gavin received the fellowship for his planned work to study how the brain represents speech. He conducts research in the Neural Acoustic Processing Lab under the supervision of EE Prof. Nima Mesgarani.

"I feel so honored to be a recipient of this fellowship, and I'm so excited because I know it will help me pursue my research goals with more freedom. And of course I'm so thankful for the support of my advisor, Dr. Mesgarani, who encouraged me to apply and who has helped set me on a great path as I start my PhD."

In his research, he hopes to develop new methods for reading information from the brain and to use these methods to understand how we comprehend speech and other sounds.

Gavin works at the intersection of neuroscience and engineering by applying techniques from machine learning and other quantitative fields to analyze brain recordings from people listening to speech. He is also very interested in recent research that has developed computer models that can understand and generate speech with very good accuracy, and hopes to work with these models in the future to find connections between how computers and humans process language.

Gavin graduated in 2020 from Johns Hopkins University with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering, and that was where his interest in neuroscience began.