Elaine Chew

Elaine Chew is a research area director at USC’s prestigious Integrated Media Systems Center, an engineering teacher in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and … accomplished concert pianist.

Chew believes music is the ideal domain in which to study communication, creativity, human perception and cognition. “My technical training is in operations research, the science of decision-making,” she explains. “A performance is the result of a series of decisions, either conscious or unconscious. Understand music, and you begin to understand how the human mind works.”

By building computer models that can probe more deeply into the structure of music and by relating this structure to performance decisions, she hopes to gain a deeper understanding of human creativity and communication.

Chew balances her engineering career with an active piano performance schedule that has taken her around the world.