I am an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco with a joint appointment at the Institute for Health & Aging at the School of Nursing and the Department of Otolaryngology at the School of Medicine.  My research focuses on the neuroscience of creativity, complex sound perception in cochlear implant users, as well as the impact of music on the aging brain. 

I’m a collegiate faculty member of San Francisco Conservatory of Music, co-teaching a class with Dr. Indre Viskontas on Music and the Brain.  I’m the scientific analyst for the UCSF team starting the Sound Health Network in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts, National Institutes of Health, and the Kennedy Center, whose mission is to increase public awareness and research about music, health, and wellness. 

Prior to these positions, I served as adjunct faculty at the Peabody Institute of Music and Johns Hopkins University teaching introductory survey courses on music perception and cognition to graduate and undergraduate students.  From July 2015-January 2016, I also worked for the Retrospective Index of Music Periodicals (www.ripm.org), a scholarly non-profit organization that digitizes and provides access to music periodicals from 1760-1966 for researchers and scholars. I completed my Ph.D. in Music Theory and Cognition from Northwestern University in March 2015. 

My dissertation research focused on factors that influence attention when listening to multiple musical lines. Specifically, I investigated how musical structure and elements of an individual’s musical training affect where attention is directed when listening to Baroque imitative counterpoint. My interdisciplinary work took place in the Music Cognition Lab as well as at the Auditory Neuroscience Lab, combining perceptual studies with neurobiological studies.  My dissertation combined approaches from musicology, music theory, cognitive science, and auditory neuroscience to study the question of attention when listening to music.  I am also interested in neural plasticity and musical training, exploring the musical brain and the biological basis of musical performance.

Before my Ph.D., I completed Master’s degrees in Musicology and Piano Performance from Peabody Institute of Music.  I have published papers in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and have given invited lectures at Wellesley College, University of Chicago, American University, Peabody Conservatory of Music, and the Juilliard School.  I have presented at regional, national, and international meetings of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC), the Neurosciences and Music Conferences, the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (SfNC), and the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO).