Julia Hirschberg is Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of computer science at Columbia University. Her research focuses on prosody, spoken dialogue systems, and emotional and deceptive speech. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985.  She worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories — Research from 1985-2003 as a Member of Technical Staff and as a Department Head, creating the Human-Computer Interface Research Department at Bell Labs and moving with it to AT&T Labs.   She served as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics from 1993-2003 and as an editor-in-chief of Speech Communication from 2003-2006.  She is on the Editorial Board of Speech Communication and of the Journal of Pragmatics.  She was on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) from 1993-2003, have been on the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) since 1996, and served on the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 1999-2007 (as President 2005-2007).

She is currently the chair of the ISCA Distinguished Lecturers selection committee.  She is on the IEEE SLTC, the executive board of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the CRA Board of Directors, and the board of the CRA-W.  She has been active in working for diversity at AT&T and at Columbia.  She has been a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence since 1994, an ISCA Fellow since 2008, and became an ACL Fellow in the founding group in 2012. She received a Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (CESAA) Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award in 2009, received an honorary doctorate (hedersdoktor) from KTH in 2007, is the 2011 recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award and, also received the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement in the same year.