Music for Well-Being Amid COVID-19:
Perspectives from Science, Medicine, and Community
Thursday, April 15 at 7:00pm
Now available to watch on YouTube!
LSO musicians Dr. Psyche Loui, Dr. Lisa Wong, and Dr. Jennifer Zuk explore how music benefits our well-being from the perspectives of science, medicine, and community - particularly amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Register at the link below to receive the Zoom link for this FREE event.
Longwood Symphony is proud to present this event as part of the 2021 Cambridge Science Festival (CSF). This year CSF will be the entire month of April – a 30 day celebration of science. To learn more about CSF, visit their website https://cambridgesciencefestival.org/
Follow Cambridge Science Festival on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for daily prompts to explore and celebrate science throughout the month of April.
About the Speakers
Psyche Loui, PhD.
Assistant Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice, Department of Music, College of Arts Media and Design, Northeastern University
What gives people the chills when they are moved by a piece of music? How does connectivity in the brain enable or disrupt music perception? Can music be used to help those with neurological and psychiatric disorders? These are questions that Psyche Loui tackles in the MIND (Music, Imaging, and Neural Dynamics) Lab, which studies the neuroscience of music perception and cognition. Psyche Loui is an Assistant Professor of Creativity and Creative Practice in the Department of Music at Northeastern University. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with her PhD in Psychology, and attended Duke University as an undergraduate with degrees in Psychology and Music. Loui has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on music and the brain. Her work has been featured by the Associated Press, New York Times, Boston Globe, BBC, CNN, NBC news and CBS radio, the Scientist magazine, and other news outlets.
Lisa M. Wong, MD
Associate Co-Director, Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical School
Dr. Lisa Wong is a pediatrician, musician and arts education advocate. Originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, she graduated from Harvard with a degree in East Asian Studies and attended NYU School of Medicine, returning to Boston for her pediatric residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has practiced pediatrics at Milton Pediatric Associates since 1986, is an assistant professor of pediatrics and associate co-director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Wong is a co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical School and Boston Arts Consortium for Health (BACH). She serves on several boards, including Conservatory Lab Charter School, New England Foundation for the Arts, A Far Cry ensemble and the Boston Public Schools Arts Advisory Board. She is a co-author of the National Academies of Science, Medicine and Engineering, co-authoring its seminal white paper on the role of Arts and Humanities in STEMM in higher education.
Dr. Wong joined the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of Boston’s medical community, in 1985, and served as LSO’s president for 21 years. During her tenure, she helped create LSO's signature “Healing Art of Music Program” which has benefited over 50 medical nonprofits in the greater Boston area through musical concerts and collaborations.
At the start of the pandemic, Dr. Wong and Dr. Ron Hirschberg created Boston Hope Music, a program that provides music opportunities, music lessons and performances for patients and frontline healthcare workers. Recently, Boston Hope Music has been providing music for patients at mass vaccination centers.
Dr. Wong received an honorary degree in education from Wheelock College in 2016 and a Changemaker Award from the Institute of Nonprofit Management in 2020. Her book Scales to Scalpels: Doctors who practice the healing arts of Music and Medicine was published in 2012.
Jennifer Zuk, PhD CCC-SLP
Assistant Professor, Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Boston University
Jennifer Zuk is a clinical researcher working at the intersection of music cognition, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and speech-language pathology. Her research employs behavioral and neuroimaging tools with children from infancy through school age to study relationships between music, language, and the brain throughout development.
Jennifer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at Boston University, where she leads the Communication and Neurodevelopment Lab. She earned her PhD from Harvard University, and completed clinical training in speech-language pathology at the MGH Institute of Health Professions and Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Jennifer received dual bachelor’s degrees in Music Education and Cognitive Science from Case Western Reserve University, and her Ed.M. in Mind, Brain, and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She has been honored with awards from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.