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 @samuelmehr, where he often posts about being an academic dad.

Courtney Hilton

Postdoctoral Fellow

Courtney is a cognitive scientist interested in music, language, and how people learn. Originally trained as a classical guitarist at the Australian National University, he then got distracted, accidentally getting a PhD on the topic of rhythm in language processing at the University of Sydney. He is also readily distracted by other pursuits such as making music, playing chess, and reading philosophy. He grew up in the rural town of Gidgegannup in Western Australia. You can follow him @courtneybhilton.

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.

Ekanem Ebinne

Research Assistant

Ekanem Ebinne is working on a project on infant-directed music and its relation to well-being in parents. In her free time she enjoys permaculture gardening, choir singing, and all things Portugal.

Lidya Yurdum

Affiliated Graduate Student

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 is currently completing a Research Masters in psychology at the University of Amsterdam, and is exploring how humans communicate cross-culturally, in the areas of music and emotion.

Cody Moser

Affiliated Graduate Student

Cody is a PhD student at the University of California, Merced working on questions related to agent-based modeling, cross-cultural psychology, modularity, and cultural innovation. In his free time he enjoys writing, flint knapping, and primitive archery. You can follow him @LTF_01.

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.

Rachel Yan

Affiliated Graduate Student

Rachel is a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Michigan. As an avid piano player, who also studies psychology and data science, she is curious about the impact of music on children’s social- cognitive development. She has been working on a project looking at how dialect change may affect children’s literacy skills with Peter de Villiers at Smith, and hopes to broaden her scope of research in music. When she’s not working, she enjoys finding good coffee and wondering around the neighborhood.

Liam Crowley

Affiliated Graduate Student

Liam Crowley is a PhD student in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). He is currently working on a project investigating children’s ability to predict musical function from a song’s form alone. Outside of lab work you’ll find Liam tending bar at his part time job, and if he’s lucky, hitting the slopes of Mt Ruapehu.

Alex Mackiel

Affiliated Graduate Student

Alex is a psychology and English graduate of Carleton College and recently completed his master’s in Psychological Science at SUNY New Paltz. He is interested in the evolutionary and developmental origins of human psychology and cooperation. He is especially interested in how norms, morality, language, and music function to produce social behavior. In his free time he enjoys science writing, playing piano, coffee, and running outside. You can follow him @ajmackiel.

Jingxuan Liu

Undergraduate Researcher

Jing is an undergraduate studying psychology and statistics at Duke University. She is interested in the intersection of psychology and music, as well as how language might interact with music perception. In her free time, she enjoys playing her flute, messing around with the piano, sipping boba, and wandering around the old streets in her hometown Beijing.

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
  Dartmouth University
• Joshua Fiechter
  Ball Aerospace
• Luke Glowacki
  Pennsylvania State 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
  Princeton University
• 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
  Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
• Elizabeth Spelke
  Harvard University
• Diana Tamir
  Princeton University
• Sandra Trehub
  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

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

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 UCLA, with Dr. Greg Bryant.

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

join

The Music Lab is in the process of a transition away from Harvard University. We are recruiting graduate students at both MSc and PhD levels, to be based at the University of Auckland (New Zealand; apply here), and a postdoc, to be based at Yale University (New Haven, CT, USA but with remote work options possible; apply here). Candidates interested in PhD study in Psychology at Yale can also be based in our lab, if working jointly with another Psychology faculty member. If you are interested in joining us in any of these roles, please contact Dr Mehr at sam@wjh.harvard.edu.

We do not currently have any open positions for research assistants and are not planning on hosting summer interns in 2022. From time to time we hire short-term RAs, who work remotely. If you are interested in such a position, or would like to apply to work with us for academic credit or work-study, please contact us at musiclab@g.harvard.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 (details). Please get in touch with Dr. Mehr at sam@wjh.harvard.edu if you are interested in applying.