Faculty Spotlight: Michelle Vigeant

Dr. Michelle Vigeant is an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University with a joint appointment in the Graduate Program in Acoustics and the Architectural Engineering Department. Prior to joining Penn State in 2012, Dr. Vigeant was an assistant professor at the University of Hartford in the Mechanical Engineering Department within the undergraduate Acoustics Program for 4.5 years. She obtained her Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering, focusing on Architectural Acoustics, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2008 and she received a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada in 2003.

Vigeant was elected to the Acoustical Society of America's Executive Council for a three-year term, starting July 1, 2017. She is also one of three faculty at Penn State to be a recipient of the 3M Non-tenured Faculy Award. 

The overarching goal of Vigeant's research is to quantify the perceptual, cognitive, and physiological effects of room acoustics and noise on humans. She leads the Sound Perception and Room Acoustics Laboratory (SPRAL) and her group's research areas include: concert hall acoustics, spatial audio reproduction, effects of office noise on task performance, and annoyance due to aircraft noise. For the majority of her work, the research approach is to either measure or simulate sound fields, and then conduct listening tests to obtain the human response to the acoustic stimuli.