Professor Carol Espy-Wilson Named UMD Distinguished University Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty member Carol Espy-Wilson has been named a 2026 University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor in recognition of excellence, impact, and significant contributions to her field of knowledge and profession, both nationally and internationally. The title of Distinguished University Professor is the highest academic honor for UMD faculty members and is only bestowed on 7% of tenured faculty.

Professor Espy-Wilson holds joint appointments with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Institute for Systems Research (ISR). She is the Director of the UMD Speech Communication Lab, which studies the intersection of scientific research and engineering in speech and related areas.

She received her B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a faculty member at Boston University prior to joining ECE in 2001.

As an internationally recognized researcher in speech communication, Carol Espy-Wilson's research integrates digital signal processing, speech science, linguistics, and machine learning to advance both the fundamental understanding of speech and the development of transformative speech technologies. Her work spans speech and speaker recognition, speech production, speech enhancement, and single-channel speech separation. More recently, her research has focused on speech as a rich behavioral signal for characterizing cognitive and affective states, including emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and the detection, assessment, and monitoring of mental health conditions.

As the founder and Chief Technology Officer of OmniSpeech, Carol Espy-Wilson leads a company launched through the University of Maryland Venture Accelerator Program. The company's mission is to improve both human and machine understanding of speech through innovative speech technologies. Its flagship speech extraction technology virtually eliminates background noise, dramatically improving speech intelligibility across a wide range of communication platforms and devices. More recently, the company developed deepfake audio detection technology that reliably distinguishes between human and AI-generated voices.

She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). She was also a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has authored or co-authored numerous journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters, and has served on the editorial boards of several leading scientific journals and on the National Advisory Councils of multiple institutes within the National Institutes of Health.

At the University of Maryland, she has been a recipient of the Jimmy Lin Award for Innovation, UMD Campus Woman of Influence Award, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award, Invention of the Year Award and ISR Senior Faculty Fellow Award. She is recognized as the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first African-American woman and first African American, to achieve tenure and be promoted to the rank of full professor in the UMD ECE Department.

Published September 8, 2026