Youssef Amin is a first year PhD-student in the Musicology program at Princeton University. Prior to joining the lab, he worked on fMRI studies of group behavior in the Krosch Lab at Cornell University. He has a B.A. in Psychology and a B.M. in Piano from Ithaca College. He received an M.A. in Psychology from New York University, where he studied attentional tracking in contrapuntal music under the tutelage of Claire Pelofi. His broader research interests include emotional and attentional processes in music. He is particularly interested in perception of motivic material in music, and its role in narrativization and emotional responses. Outside of the lab, Youssef likes to spend his free time exercising, dancing, and reading history & politics.

Karen Electra Christianson is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Princeton University, with a research focus in music cognition. Her approach to music cognition is informed by her background as both a musician and a scientist, having formally trained in organ performance, musicology, and biology. As a concert organist, Karen has performed at prestigious venues in North America and Europe, including the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Metropolitan United Church in Toronto, the Salzburg Cathedral in Austria, and the Munich Cathedral (Frauenkirche) in Germany. Karen has performed extensively in England, including at Durham Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral, Coventry Cathedral, Norwich Cathedral, Ely Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, and twice at Westminster Abbey, where she gave her London debut in 2013 at age 17. She has also been featured in regional and national radio broadcasts in the USA, including "From the Top" on National Public Radio. Karen completed her undergraduate degree in molecular biology and music at Harvard College, where she served as President of the Harvard Organ Society for three years. She was awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard to complete her Master’s degree in Music at Durham University (UK), where she served as Organ Scholar for Hatfield and St. Chad’s College Chapels. Before starting at Princeton, she worked for two years as a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard researching cellular signaling in cancer and neural cell models.

Itamar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute working in the music cognition lab and in the Hasson lab.
In his research, Itamar is interested in how subjective experience is grounded in multimodal processing. Itamar is currently studying the similarity between semantic and neural representations of musically evoked narratives. Listening to music engages our auditory system, visual and motor imagery, semantic associations, sense of self and our autobiographical memories. Can computational tools assist in isolating these components of music listening and the associations between them?
Itamar is broadly interested in leveraging deep learning models for the study of social and higher order cognitive processes in naturalistic settings. This includes processes such as meaning-making in naturalistic social interactions, emotion, self- and other-perception, spontaneous thought or creativity.
Prior to joining the music cognition lab Itamar got his PhD (pending approval) in psychology from Tel Aviv university where he studied computational representations of autobiographical emotions. He has also been involved in research in the neuroscience of pain, creativity, neuromodulation and other interventions in psychiatry.

Simon is a current sophomore at Princeton planning to major in Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience. At Princeton, he enjoys playing jazz piano and constructing crosswords for the New York Times and the Daily Princetonian, where he is the Head Puzzles Editor.

Kalu is a sophomore intending to pursue a concentration in either Computer Science or Neuroscience, as well as certificates in Cognitive Science and Technology & Society. Music has been a significant part of his journey to and through Princeton. He first learned to play the piano at age 4, picked up the flute and violin in middle school, and started writing music for piano at age 15. He greatly enjoys being involved in music on campus as a performer in the Princeton University Glee Club and a performer/arranger in the Princeton Pianists Ensemble. In his free time, Kalu likes to read, listen to music, practice piano, and play Nintendo games. He hopes to combine his interests in technology, neuroscience, and music as a research assistant in the Music Cognition Lab.

Gavriela Veciana is an undergraduate junior from New York interested in the intersection of ethnomusicology and music cognition. Her background is in piano and music theater voice and she would kill to see Bad Bunny live.

Hannah Wilkie is a PhD student in the Musicology program at Princeton University. She is interested in the relationship between music, space and aesthetic experience. Hannah completed her BA degree in Music at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, where she was also a senior scholar. Her MPhil dissertation at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Music and Science explored interactions between digital room acoustic parameters and musical emotion, and was supported by a Cambridge Trust and Clare Hall Boak Masters Studentship. Beyond her academic studies, Hannah has performed as a cellist and choral singer.