Aniruddh Patel
Aniruddh (Ani) Patel researches the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of music cognition. He received a BA in biology from the University of Virginia (1987) and an AM (1990) and Ph.D. (1996) in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. He then joined The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA, where he was a Senior Fellow from 2005-2012. He is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University.
Areas of special interest include the relationship between music and language (the topic of his 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford Univ. Press), the processing of musical rhythm, and cross-species studies of music processing. A wide variety of methods are used in this research, including brain imaging, behavioral experiments, theoretical analyses, acoustic research, and comparative studies with nonhuman animals.
Dr. Patel has served as President for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2009-2011). In 2015 Dr. Patel was appointed as Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), in the Program in Brain, Mind, and Consciousness. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book on the evolution of music cognition.
