Carol Espy-Wilson

Electrical engineer Carol Espy-Wilson was born on April 23, 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia to Mattie Cooper Espy and Matthew Espy. She received her B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1979 followed by her S.M. (1981), E.E. (1984), and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), making her the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from MIT.

After receiving her Ph.D. degree, Espy-Wilson went on to work as a research associate in MIT’s speech communication group, a multidisciplinary laboratory engaged in teaching and research on the production and perception of speech by humans and machines. In 1990, she joined Boston University as an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where she held the Clare Boothe Luce Professorship until 1995. In 2001, Espy-Wilson filed her first patent for technology to enhance speech in telecommunications and joined the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park as an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research. She was made full professor at the University of Maryland in 2007, making her the first African American in electrical and computer engineering to achieve tenure and be promoted to the rank of full professor. She later became director of the Speech Communication Lab. In 2008, Espy-Wilson was named a Sargent-Faull Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The following year, Espy-Wilson founded OmniSpeech, a technology company that develops AI noise suppression and cancelation software.

Espy-Wilson chaired the Speech Technical Committee of the Acoustical Society of America from 2007 to 2010 and has served as an associate editor of Acoustics Today and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and on the editorial board of Computer, Speech and Language. She also has served as a member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation at the National Institutes of Health and of the Advisory Council for the NIH National Institutes on Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Espy-Wilson is a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association and the Acoustical Society of America and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Espy-Wilson’s many honors and awards include the Independent Scientist Award from the National Institutes of Health in 1998, the Honda Initiation Award in 2003, and the NIH Career Award in 2003.

Espy-Wilson and her husband, John Silvanus Wilson Jr., live in Washington, D.C. They have three children, Ayana Wilson, Ashia Wilson, and John Wilson.

Carol Espy-Wilson was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on August 26, 2022.