Faculty

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and serves as Vice President for Presidential Initiatives at the University of Southern California. He is Professor in the Signal and Image Processing Institute of USC’s Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with joint appointments across computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and medicine. Narayanan’s research examines human-centered sensing, signal processing and machine intelligence, with a focus on speech, language and multimodal communication.

His work explores human communication, emotion and behavior through interdisciplinary approaches spanning engineering, computing and the social sciences. Narayanan has published more than 1,000 scholarly works and his research has led to patented technologies and commercialization through startups in conversational AI and mental health care. He has collaborated with academic, industry and government partners and has held research and leadership roles at institutions including USC, AT&T Labs and Google.

Narayanan is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of multiple professional societies, including IEEE, ACM and the Acoustical Society of America. His work has received major honors from organizations including IEEE, ISCA and ACM. He has also received university honors for research, mentoring and service, including a USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship and a USC Distinguished Faculty Service Award. Narayanan has served in leadership and editorial roles across international research communities and professional organizations.