Bracha
Laufer-Goldshtein’s longstanding fascination with science, technology,
mathematics and physics drew her to the multidisciplinary field of electrical
engineering. She won the Rector’s and Dean’s prizes for outstanding
undergraduate students at Bar-Ilan University for every year of her BSc
studies, graduating summa cum laude and first in her class.
Bracha continued her studies in the combined MSc-PhD track at
Bar-Ilan University. Under the joint supervision of Prof. Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan
University and Prof. Ronen Talmon of the Technion – Israel Institute of
Technology, she is investigating novel approaches to acoustic signal analysis
and processing using geometric learning. In particular, she is developing
methods for source separation and localization based on multiple microphone
recordings, in adverse challenging noise and reverberation conditions. The
methods are based on geometric learning over manifolds and simplexes, which
extract low-dimensional mappings of complex acoustic responses, leading to
compact and simplified representations. Bracha has received several prizes and awards for her research achievements, including the Adams Fellowship of the Israel
Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Wolf Foundation prize, the Israel
Ministry of Science and Technology award for women in science and the Bar-Ilan
Rector’s prize.
Bracha's work emphasizes both theoretical depth and practical
relevance, envisioning applications in human–automobile communication, hearing
aids, and smart homes for the elderly. The results of her research have been published
in six papers in leading journals in signal processing and in ten international
conference papers, based on her conference talks. Her work was chosen for
presentation in a three-hour tutorial talk at the European Signal Processing
Conference 2019, and the same findings will soon appear in a survey monograph
in Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing.
Alongside her research work, Bracha has served as a teaching assistant in several undergraduate courses and as the lecturer in one of the core courses for second-year undergraduate students at Bar-Ilan. She enjoys teaching and has received high scores in teaching assessment surveys.
Upon the completion of her PhD, Bracha looks forward to starting her postdoctoral training in the United States, in which she intends to address challenging new problems in complex high-dimensional data analysis by combining novel geometrical and statistical models. The methods developed thereby will be leveraged in various applications, such as medical diagnosis, disaster prediction and control, and autonomous systems.