Eva Dyer is listening to the brain’s code with a little help from AI
Penn professor Eva Dyer merges her background in music and audio engineering with artificial intelligence to help uncover brain signals and explore how the brain processes information.
2 min. read
When Eva Dyer, Rachleff Associate Professor in Bioengineering and in computer and information science at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, talks about the brain, she doesn’t just talk like a neuroscientist. She speaks with the rhythm of someone who listens deeply. Once a jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist, Dyer now orchestrates another kind of harmony: finding the hidden signals in our brains, with the help of artificial intelligence.
Eva Dyer is the Rachleff Associate Professor in Bioengineering and in computer and information science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Engineering)
“As a kid, I didn’t have a lot of exposure to what a scientist was or what they looked like,” says Dyer. “I was the first in my family to receive a higher education. But, I didn’t set out to be a scientist; I just followed the questions I was curious about.”
One of those early questions was how do we interpret music?
In high school, Dyer was immersed in music. At the same time in her physics class, she was learning about sound and vibration.
“It blew my mind that physics and math could explain the things I loved most,” she says. “There was something magical about realizing that sound, emotion and science weren’t separate, they were deeply connected.”
Dyer received a dual degree in audio engineering and music. The concept of auditory perception, or how our brain hears and interprets sounds in the world around us “made me realize the brain is a key part of how we experience sound,” she says. “That launched me into neuroscience.”
From there, Dyer leaned into machine learning and signal processing, developing the computational tools to analyze how the brain responds to complex environments. This was before people started to merge the AI and neuroscience fields together, but she could see where the interdisciplinary potential was going.
Today, Dyer’s lab at Penn sits at the intersection of neuroscience and AI. She works closely with collaborators in Penn Medicine and across disciplines to decode the brain’s signals, including everything from intention and movement to mental health symptoms, using powerful machine learning techniques.
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