Carol Espy-Wilson facts for kids

Carol Yvonne Espy-Wilson (born around 1957) is an amazing electrical engineer. She is also a Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. She earned her highest degree, a Ph.D., in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.

Early Life and Schooling

Carol Yvonne Espy was born in Atlanta, Georgia, around 1957. She was the youngest of four children. Her family had high hopes for all their kids. Carol often says her family helped her succeed.

A Brother's Influence

Her older brother, Calvin, was seven years older. He was a big role model and advisor for Carol. When she was just five, Calvin started teaching her math. He would share what he learned in school.

Calvin studied Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech. This inspired Carol to choose the same major. After Calvin got his master's degree from Stanford University, he brought an application home for Carol. He made sure she applied there.

University Studies

Carol decided to go to Stanford University. She studied Electrical Engineering and earned her first degree, a Bachelor of Science (BS), in 1979.

She then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for graduate school. She earned her Master of Science (MS) degree in Electrical Engineering in 1981. Her master's project was about how noise affects signals.

Carol received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1987. Her advisor was Kenneth N. Stevens. Her Ph.D. research focused on how to make computers understand human speech better.

Career and Research

After getting her Ph.D., Dr. Espy-Wilson stayed at MIT for a while. She worked as a researcher there. Later, she became a professor at Boston University from 1990 to 2001.

Today, she is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She leads the Speech Communication Lab there. She is the first African American woman to become a full professor in that department at the University of Maryland.

What She Studies

Dr. Espy-Wilson's research combines engineering, language, and how sounds are made. She works on speech recognition. This is about teaching computers to understand what people say. She tries to make this technology better by studying how we move our mouths and tongues when we speak.

Her work also includes:

• Understanding how we produce speech.
• Making speech clearer, like removing background noise.
• Identifying who is speaking.
• Separating different voices in a recording.
• Detecting languages in audio.

A big part of her research is understanding the link between how we speak, the sounds we make, and how we hear them. She uses this knowledge to create new speech technologies.

OmniSpeech and Awards

Dr. Espy-Wilson is also the founder of OmniSpeech. This company creates technology to make sound quality better. It helps with things like cell phone calls and hearing aids.

In 2008-2009, she was a special fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She focused on making speech recognition systems work well even with noise. In 2022, she was named an IEEE Fellow. This honor recognized her important work in improving speech technology.

Family Life

Carol Espy-Wilson is married to John Silvanus Wilson, Jr.. He was the President of Morehouse College in Atlanta. He also worked for the White House on programs for historically Black colleges.

They have three children together. Their twin daughters, Ayana and Ashia, graduated from Stanford University and Harvard University in 2011. Their son, John "Jay" Sylvanus Wilson, III, went to Princeton University.