Stefan Bilbao

Stefan Bilbao (B.A. Physics, Harvard, 1992, MSc., PhD Electrical Engineering, Stanford, 1996 and 2001 respectively) was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is currently Professor of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing in the Acoustics and Audio Group at the University of Edinburgh. He previously held positions at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, at the Queen's University Belfast, and the Stanford Space Telecommunications and Radioscience Laboratory, and held a fellowship at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris, funded by Harvard University, during which time he worked at the Institut de Recherche et Coodination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). 

He has led the NESS project (ERC-StG-270068-NESS: Next Generation Sound Synthesis) and WRAM project (ERC-PoC:737574-WRAM: Wave-based Room Acoustics Modeling), both funded by the European Research Council, and running jointly between the Acoustics and Audio Group and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh between 2012 and 2018.

He is a senior member of the IEEE and has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (2019-2023) and is currently an associate editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters (2024-), and a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (2025-). He is author or coauthor on more than 200 publications, including two monographs. He was awarded the Foreign Medal of the French Acoustical Society in 2022. 

Main research interests are: physics-based sound synthesis; 3D room acoustics simulation; spatial audio encoding; virtual analog modeling; and machine learning for audio applications. More generally, he is interested in the application of numerical methods to problems in audio and acoustics, and works closely with composers of electronic music.