Ada Lovelace Day

It’s Ada Lovelace Day , a day of blogging about women in science and technology. I’m afraid this is not a very thorough post, things like a PhD thesis and various papers are occupying my time, but I still wanted to point out a female influence on my work.

In my fantasy spatial audio conference/dinner party I would like to strike up a conversation with Elizabeth Wenzel. (My fantasy conference/dinner party would also include Barbara Shinn-Cunningham and Sally Jo Cunningham.)

There are not a lot of women that lead major research groups in anything related to audio; there certainly aren’t many women in spatial audio research. Elizabeth Wenzel first stood out to me in her publications; I like her writing style. She then stood out even more so when I learned she is the director of a research lab at NASA-Ames. I’ve read and referred to her work for a couple years now, but I don’t know much about her beyond her NASA personnel pages here and here.

She and her research lab have done significant work in spatial auditory display, especially display using binaural audio. I appreciate the clear research questions that are asked and then answered. I think they are good examples of rigorous basic scientific research. Her lab is the primary (if not only) US government funded organization I would be interested in working with.