people

Samuel Mehr

Principal Investigator (website)

Sam is an Eastman-trained musician and Harvard-trained scientist interested in how and why human minds are designed to perceive and produce music. He grew up in Cambridge, MA and Lexington, MA. You can follow him on Twitter and Mastodon, where he often posts about being an academic dad.

Courtney Hilton

Postdoc (Research Fellow)

Courtney began his career as a musician before accidentally becoming a scientist. He grew up in the rural Australian town of Gidgegannup, and studied at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. After his PhD, he joined the lab as a postdoc at Harvard, then Yale, now at the University of Auckland. He otherwise makes music, art, cooks, does stuff in nature, and hangs out with his two cats Dave and Gidge.

Eun Cho

Postdoc

Eun is a music educator specializing in early childhood music and a researcher, interested in interdisciplinary research that encompasses music, education, psychology, and culture. Since the completion of her DMA in music education (University of Southern California), she has been leading various research projects on the psychological aspects of everyday musical experiences in diverse populations. Aside from being an academic, she is a happily married mom with two kids, based in sunny California.

Logan James

Affiliated Postdoc

Logan is a biologist who investigates acoustic communication in animals. He completed his PhD with Jon Sakata (McGill University) studying biases in how birds learn and produce songs. Currently, he investigates call preferences in frogs with Mike Ryan (UT Austin/Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), as well as how frog communication signals vary across species. He has recently expanded his cross-species comparisons to analyze biases in acoustic perception in a range of species such as crickets, tree frogs, sparrows, and humans.

Lidya Yurdum

Research Assistant

Lidya joined the Music Lab in 2019 as a summer RA, and has since continued to work on projects remotely, from her new home in the Netherlands. She has a Research Masters in psychology from the University of Amsterdam, and is continuing to explore how humans communicate cross-culturally, in the areas of music and emotion.

Ekanem Ebinne

Research Assistant

Ekanem is working on a project on infant-directed music and its relation to well-being in parents. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology from Rice University and graduate research experience in developmental music psychology at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. As a classically trained singer she has enjoyed singing in cathedrals in the US and England. She has taught music for babies and young children of many language backgrounds in the US, UK, Portugal, and Sweden. In her free time she enjoys permaculture gardening and all things Portugal.

Mila Bertolo

Graduate Student

Mila is a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University, working with Jon Sakata and Isabelle Peretz, and co-advised by Samuel Mehr. She works on questions about the origins of music, using tools from cross-cultural work, developmental psychology, and cross-species comparisons. You can follow her @mila_bertolo.

Marty Snarskis

Graduate student

Marty (they/he) joined the University of Auckland PhD program in February 2023 -- they are working on The Natural History of Song project, a rich dataset with music from all over the world, as well studying social inferences in infants. They previously studied the computational neuroscience of decision-making and perception at the University of Rochester and, after graduating, managed a lab studying memory at the University of Chicago. Marty enjoys being eccentric, playing music and other arts, reading widely, and hugging trees!

Zoé Schelp

Graduate Student

Zoé is a PhD student in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Auckland investigating anauralia, the inability to imagine sounds (a phenomenon like aphantasia, but for the ear). Her research is focusing on the effects of anauralia on verbal and non-verbal working memory. Outside of studies and teaching, she loves playing violin and guitar, reading, sewing and cooking/baking and winter sports.

Sorour Zekrati

Graduate Student

Sorour is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on pitch perception and examines the effect of conceptual metaphors on the way speakers of different languages (Persian and English) perceive and conceive pitch. Alongside her academic pursuits, Sorour enjoys graphic designing, learning new languages, reading psychology books, and listening to podcasts.

Gage Quigley-Tump

Graduate Student

Gage is a PhD student in psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Auckland investigating anauralia. His research focuses on the physiological measurements of anauralia and auditory imagery. He enjoys playing guitar and listening to heavy metal.

Pip Brown

Visiting PhD Student

Pip is a Phd student visiting from Warwick University, interested in all things music cognition. They are particularly interested in the development of music cognition across infancy, particularly neurodevelopmental differences in music perception. In their spare time, Pip enjoys portrait drawing and is in far too many choirs!

Estelle Lai

Honours student

Estelle is an Honours student at the University of Auckland. She has a passion for psychology and music which has led her to join the Music Lab where she will be conducting research on the social implications of music. When she’s not studying, her interests outside of music include painting, reading, gaming and finding good places to eat.

Jan Simson

Affiliated Graduate Student

Jan joined the Lab at the beginning of 2019 as a research intern before returning full-time after graduating from his bachelor’s. He is currently finishing up his master’s in Psychology/Behavioral Data Science at the University of Amsterdam and has written his thesis with the lab trying to better understand what it is that makes us like music. In his free time he enjoys bouldering and playing tennis as well as the occasional bike ride. You can follow him @_jansimson.

collaborators, past and present

• Quentin Atkinson
  University of Auckland
• Amy Belfi
  Missouri University of Science and Technology
• Aaron Benjamin
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Pramit Chaudhuri
  University of Texas, Austin
• Charlie Chubb
  UC Irvine
• Joseph Dexter
  Harvard University
• Joshua Fiechter
  Kairos Research
• Luke Glowacki
  Boston University
• Reyna Gordon
  Vanderbilt University
• Gina Grimshaw
  Victoria University of Wellington
• David Haig
  Harvard University
• Gregory Hickok
  UC Irvine
• Joshua Hartshorne
  Boston College
• Daniel Ketter
  Missouri State University
• Dean Knox
  University of Pennsylvania
• Max Krasnow
  Harvard University
• Caitlyn Lee
  Independent Developer
• Christopher Lucas
  Washington University in St. Louis
• Alia Martin
  Victoria University of Wellington
• Solena Mednicoff
  University of Nevada Las Vegas
• Daniel Müllensiefen
  Goldsmiths, University of London
• Timothy O'Donnell
  McGill University
• Isabelle Peretz
  Université de Montréal
• Steven Pinker
  Harvard University
• Disa Sauter
  University of Amsterdam
• Adena Schachner
  University of California, San Diego
• Beau Sievers
  Harvard University
• Manvir Singh
  University of California, Davis
• Elizabeth Spelke
  Harvard University
• Diana Tamir
  Princeton University
• Sandra Trehub (d. 2023)
  University of Toronto, Mississauga
• Sebastian Waz
  UC Irvine
• Ellen Winner
  Boston College

We also work with many others on the Natural History of Song project: learn more at themusiclab.org/nhs.

alumni

Rachel Yan
Affiliated grad student (2020-2022), currently a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Jingxuan Liu
Affiliated grad student (2020-2023), currently a PhD student at Columbia University.

Cody Moser
Affiliated grad student (2018-2022), currently a PhD student in Cognitive and Information Sciences the University of California, Merced, working in the Smaldino Lab.

Liam Crowley
Honours student (2019-2021), currently a PhD student in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.

Mila Bertolo
Lab manager (2019-2021) and summer intern (2018), currently a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University, working in the Sakata Lab

S. Atwood
Lab manager (2018-2019), currently a PhD student in Psychology at the Human Diversity Lab at Princeton University.

Constance Bainbridge
Research Assistant (2018-2020), currently a PhD student in Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Greg Bryant.

Julie Youngers
Summer intern (2018), currently working in the North Kansas City public schools.

join

If you are interested in PhD study in our lab, please contact Dr Mehr at mehr@hey.com with an expression of interest and a CV. We can support PhD applicants at the University of Auckland (in New Zealand) or at Yale, either in Psychology (if working jointly with a Psychology faculty member) or via the Child Study Center. Please note that funding for PhD study is competitive and may not be guaranteed, depending on the particulars of your application.

We do not currently have any open positions for full-time, salaried research assistants, but are able to host part-time RAs working in New Zealand or New Haven. If you are interested in such a position, for hourly pay; or if you would like to apply to work with us for academic credit (at the University of Auckland or at Yale) or work-study (at Yale), please contact us at musiclab@yale.edu. In general, we do not recruit volunteers, with the exception of students who are sponsored by their home institution to do an internship with us.

If you are a member of an underrepresented group in research, and interested in joining us, we can help you get funded with an NIH Diversity Supplement. Please get in touch with Dr. Mehr at mehr@hey.com if you are interested in applying.