biography
Elaine Chew earned a Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an interdisciplinary dissertation on mathematical modeling of tonality, and a B.A.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences (honors) and in Music Performance (distinction) from Stanford University. Her graduate studies were supported by an Office of Naval Research and the Josephine de Kármán Dissertation fellowships. Her subsequent work has been suported by the National Science Foundation, most notably an NSF Early Career Award and Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), an NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) grant, and NSF Engineering Research Center Collaborative Agreement grant through the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Her research interests center on the computational modeling of music and its performance. She founded and heads of the Music Computation and Cognition (MuCoaCo) Laboratory at USC, where she conducts and directs research on music and computing. She received the NSF Career/PECASE Awards for her research and education activities at the intersection of music and engineering. Chew is on the founding editorial boards of the Journal of Mathematics and Music, Journal of Music and Meaning, and ACM Computers in Entertainment. She has organized special issues and workshops on music and computing, and frequently serves on program and technical committees of music and computing conferences. She was the first honoree of the Viterbi Early Career Chair, and served as Research Area Director of IMSC. Chew also holds diplomas and degrees in piano performance from the Trinity College, London (FTCL & LTCL), and Stanford University; in 1998, she received MIT's prestigious Laya and Jerome Weisner Award for her contribution to the arts. She was an Affiliated Artist of MIT's Music and Theatre Arts from 1998-2000, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Lehigh University before joining USC in 2001. Her artistic endeavors include the founding of the MIT-based Aurelius Ensemble (1998-2000) and field research on contemporary Chinese piano music in China funded by a MISTI grant. A proponent of contemporary and eclectic repertoire, she continues to perform widely as chamber musician and soloist. At USC, she has initiated and participated in the multimedia concerts The Mathematics in Music, Flying Sonics, and Dark Blue Sky Dream. Chew is on sabbatical in 2007-2008, during which she and her collaborator/spouse Alexandre François are Fellows of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and will be designing analysis and interactive tools for real-time processing and visualization of contemporary music. |
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