Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is vice president for presidential initiatives, University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), where he holds appointments as professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, pediatrics, and otolaryngology — head and neck surgery, and research director of the Information Sciences Institute.

Prior to USC, Narayanan was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. His interdisciplinary research focuses on developing engineering approaches to understand the human condition and in creating human-centered computing technologies to support and enhance human experiences across applications with direct societal relevance including in defense/intelligence, health, education, media and the arts.

Narayanan is a fellow at the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors.

Narayanan is also a Guggenheim Fellow and member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and a recipient of many awards for research and education, including the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, the Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society, the Engineer’s Council Distinguished Engineering Educator Award and the 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History. He has served the scientific community the broader scientific community in numerous ways including as the inaugural VP for Education for the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and as an Editorial board member for several journals including as an editor for the Computer, Speech and Language journal and editor-in-chief for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. He has published widely (with over 1,000 papers), and his inventions and patents have led to technology commercialization.