Gerald Penn is an American computer scientist specializing in mathematical linguistics and speech processing.

He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a senior member of IEEE and AAAI, and a past chair of Association for Mathematics of Language.

Penn joined University of Toronto as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in 2001.

[6] He has led numerous research projects funded by organizations such as Avaya, Bell Canada, CAE, the Connaught Fund, Microsoft, NSERC, the German Ministry for Training and Research, SMART Technologies, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

His collaborative work with Geoffrey Hinton and Hui Jiang on signal processing with neural networks revolutionized acoustic modelling for speech recognition systems, and received the Best Paper Award from IEEE Signal Processing Society.