Rosa Abrahams
1st Year PhD • rosaabrahams2011@u.northwestern.edu
Rosa Abrahams is from the Washington, DC, metropolitan area and is a PhD student in music theory and cognition at Northwestern University. She holds a BM in music theory (2010) from The Eastman School of Music, where she focused on researching children’s cognitive capabilities for learning and internalizing music theoretical concepts, and on pedagogical methods for teaching music theory to children in grades K-5 (working with Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin). Rosa completed a MM in music theory and cognition (2011) at Northwestern University, researching historical and philosophical backgrounds for reform in music theory pedagogy. Rosa is currently exploring how music has developed as a field and how the learning of music in discrete sub-disciplines of the field may effect comprehensive human learning.  She is also developing a repertoire expertise in Jewish music.

Bruno Alcalde
1st Year PhD • brunoalcalde@u.northwestern.edu
Bruno Alcalde is originally from Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is a first-year PhD student. He holds a bachelor degree in composition from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and a masters degree in music theory from Indiana University. Bruno’s main instrument is electric guitar and he has performed with rock, jazz and Brazilian music groups throughout the years. He also had his chamber music works performed several times in Brazil, releasing, in 2008, an album with the group of Brazilian composers Avante. Bruno taught music theory, composition and arranging of popular music for two years at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Brazil) before coming to the United States to further his studies. His main research interest is the study of musical signification from an ecological perspective, contrasting non-referential and strongly referential repertoires, such as abstract contemporary music and pop music. Other interests are embodiment, musical preference and unified theories of human cognition.

Janet Bourne
3rd Year PhD • janetbourne2015@u.northwestern.edu
Janet Bourne is a third-year PhD student from Northern Virginia, outside Washington, DC. She graduated summa cum laude from the honors program at George Mason University in 2010 with a bachelor of arts in music and minors in linguistics and theater. As an undergraduate, she was a research assistant in the Auditory Research Lab and won the Achievement Award upon graduation. Janet has presented original research at a variety of conferences including the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium, Music Theory Southeast, the International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology, Association of Psychological Science, International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Graduate Theory Association/Graduate Musicology Association of Indiana University “Analysis and the Listener” Symposium, and the University of Cincinnati Biennial Student Conference “Music and Meaning: View from the Twenty-First Century.” In November 2012, she presented work at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory. She is published through the conference proceedings from the International Conference of Systematic Musicology (2012, sole author), the conference proceedings for the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (2012, co-author), and the conference proceedings from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (2011, co-author). She is interested in the connection between music and language (especially pragmatics), the cognitive strategies of how music communicates meaning, mental representations of music (schema theory), musical humor and irony, analogy in musical processing, and domain-general processing of music. As a pianist, she has won awards and enjoys accompanying musicals.

Karen Chan
PhD Candidate • karenkchan@u.northwestern.edu
Karen Chan is a PhD candidate in the music theory and cognition program at the Bienen School of Music. She graduated in 2006 as a double-major in music and neuroscience from Wellesley College. She then attended Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she attained dual master's degrees in musicology (studying with Piero Weiss) and piano performance (studying under Marian Hahn). Karen's research focuses on factors that influence attention when listening to multiple musical lines. Specifically, Karen is investigating how musical structure and elements of an individual’s musical training affect where attention is directed when listening to Baroque imitative counterpoint. Karen's interdisciplinary research, aided by a Northwestern University Advanced Cognitive Science Fellowship, takes place in the Music Cognition Lab at as well as at the Auditory Neuroscience Lab, combining perceptual studies with neurobiological studies. Karen is co-advised by Richard Ashley and Nina Kraus, and she has presented her work at several conferences including the International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition, the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis, the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory Conference, and the Neurosciences and Music IV (Learning and Memory) conference.

Matt Gilmore
5th Year PhD, 2013 • matthewgilmore2013@u.northwestern.edu
Matt came to Northwestern in 2007 to pursue research in the emerging interdisciplinary field of music cognition after receiving bachelor degrees in music studies and political science from the University of Kansas. During his first year of study under Robert Gjerdingen and Richard Ashley, he quickly developed interests in aesthetics and critical theory. Working in tandem with empirical disciplines from neuroscience to psychology and the humanities, Matt has presented papers on historical modes of listening and perceptual limits in 20th-century music, as well as designed and taught courses in the philosophy of music, music appreciation, and aesthetics. As a recipient of an Alice Kaplan Grant for the Humanities, Matt was instrumental in inaugurating Northwestern's first "sound studies" reading group, an interdisciplinary forum spanning three departments with an emphasis on understanding auditory epistemologies. During the 2011-2012 academic year, Matt studied in Paris with Northwestern’s Paris Program in Critical Theory under the direction of Sam Weber; this research was funded by a Piros Fellowship and Wonderlic Fellowship. Also the recipient of several Community Building Grants at Northwestern, Matt is an active participant in student life at Northwestern.

Olga Sanchez-Kisielewska
2nd Year PhD, 2016 • osanchez@u.northwestern.edu
Olga Sanchez comes from Madrid and has completed her master's in music theory at Northwestern (2011). Before moving to the US and joining the program at NU, she was an active performer and music educator. She holds degrees in clarinet performance, musicology and economic science. Her research interests include musical meaning, cognitive and philosophical perspectives on expression in music, connections between music and literature and the phenomenology of the aesthetic experience. She focuses mainly on classical and early twentieth-century music. Olga volunteers as a docent for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and is a student representative for Music Theory Midwest.

Kristina Knowles
2nd Year PhD • klk@u.northwestern.edu
Kristina Knowles is a native of Rochester, New York, in her second year as a PhD student at Northwestern. She graduated summa cum laude from the BM music theory program at Nazareth College 2011, where she also studied voice, piano, and composition. Kristina was named a Presser Scholar in 2010 and has presented at Nazareth’s Conference on Globalization and Culture (2011). Her primary research interest is the aural perception of post-tonal music. She is currently working on issues of rhythm, meter, and subjective time in “unmetered” post-tonal music, with an emphasis on the works of George Crumb.

Melissa Murphy
4th Year PhD • liszt@u.northwestern.edu
Melissa Murphy’s research focuses primarily on issues of schemata for improvisation, piano music of the 19th century, and Franz Liszt’s oeuvre. Before her studies at Northwestern University, she earned a bachelor of arts in music and bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 2007. Melissa Murphy first developed her deep interest in the piano compositions of Liszt while studying piano performance as a teenager under Dr. Rachel Eubanks of the Eubanks Conservatory of Music & Arts in Los Angeles, California. She continued her piano performance studies with Dr. Betty Woo of the University of California, Berkeley, and now continues to study piano and improvise in her spare time.

Cora Palfy
3rd Year PhD • corapalfy2015@u.northwestern.edu
Cora Palfy is a Georgia native in her third year at Northwestern. She completed a bachelor of arts and sciences at the University of Georgia in 2009, where she double-majored in music theory and music education. She is interested in musical narrativity, identity, and specifically in the interaction between a listener's physical response to music and the perception of agency. Cora has presented original research at UGA's Music Research Symposium (2008, 2009) and the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (2011), and the International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (2012).  She is published through the Sysmus 2012 proceedings, and is author of a forthcoming chapter in Oxford University Press's Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2013). For the past four years, Cora has interned with the Savannah Children's Choir where she was privileged to teach music theory to students ranging from second through eighth grade. She is also an active tutor, and won multiple awards as a soprano at UGA.

James Symons
4th Year PhD • jamessymons2012@u.northwestern.edu
James Symons graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2007, with a BM in a major of his own design. In his work as research associate at Harvard’s Mass General Hospital at the Institute for Music and Brain Science prior to coming to Northwestern, James was involved in several studies relating to music and brain injury, music and phonetics, music and nociception, and auditory psychophyics. More recently, James' research explores issues of similarity and patterning in music and the cognition of musical style, using computer algorithms to model these aspects of cognition.