Mike Heinz

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 served as Associate Editor for the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (JARO) from 2016-2024.