Poppy Crum works to bridge the gap between technology and insightful, effective human interaction. As a multi-dimensional advocate of empathetic technology, she builds technologies that best leverage human physiology to enhance our experiences and how we interact with the world.

Poppy serves as the Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories and as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and Program in Symbolic Systems.

Poppy is dedicated to the development of immersive technologies that leverage human physiology and perceptual realities to enhance our experiences and interactions in the world. She has advanced a mission to democratize the way people of all abilities benefit from sensory technologies – and how effectively technology communicates back to each of us. She believes the power of intelligent technologies is only realized with dynamic optimization and learning of as much of our personal and contextual data as possible.

At Dolby, Poppy directs the growth of internal science. She is responsible for integrating neuroscience and sensory data science into algorithm design, technological development, and technology strategy. At Stanford, her work focuses on the impact and feedback potential of new technologies including gaming and immersive environments such as Augmented and Virtual Reality on neuroplasticity and learning.

Poppy Crum: Devices Will Know More About Our Well-Being Than Doctors

Neuroscientist Poppy Crum explains how empathetic technology can shape our unique internal state to respond and make decisions creating experiences that help us live better and healthier lives.

““Our experience of the world is always some state of illusion.There is no single reality of the physical world that is the same for each of us or for any given moment in time. Instead, we experience a continuously malleable perceptual reality that is the product of our individual differences, past exposures, and contexts. And how effective I am in the world is entirely dependent on how well my brain knows what to get rid of and what to emphasize in my perception. Our technology needs to do the same.””

AWARDS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
 

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Poppy is a U.S. representative and vice-chair to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and a member of the Stanford Research Institute Technical Council. Prior to joining Dolby Laboratories, Poppy was Research Faculty in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where her neurophysiological research focused on understanding the neural correlates of how we hear in a complex acoustic environment and the functional circuitry of the auditory cortex.

Poppy is a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society. She is a 2018 recipient of the Advanced Imaging Society’s Distinguished Leadership Award, a 2017 recipient of the Consumer Technology Association’s Technology and Standards Achievement Award for work towards the introduction of over-the-counter hearing-aid devices, and has been named to Billboard Magazine’s 100 most influential female executives in the music industry. Prior to academic study as a neuroscientist and work in industry, Poppy was a performance violinist.

She is a frequent speaker on topics related to the intersection of human experience, artificial intelligence, sensory data-science, and immersive technologies.

EDUCATION
 

  • Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

  • PhD, UC Berkeley, Neuroscience/Psychophysics

  • M.A, McGill University, Experimental Psychology/Cognitive Science

  • B.Mus, University of Iowa, Violin Performance