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John R. Iversen
John Rehner Iversen, Ph.D. is a cognitive neuroscientist studying the interactions between music and the brain. He recently joined McMaster University as an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour after a decade at the UC San Diego. Iversen (co)directs several studies of the impact of music training on development in childhood and adolescence, including the EARLI project, part of a National Endowment for the Arts Research Laboratory. These projects place the impact of music into a broader neurodevelopmental framework, in which researchers are charting the ‘growth curves’ of the developing brain to understand how brain development shapes the emerging skills of each individual. Iversen has championed the idea of leveraging existing large-scale developmental studies such as the NIH Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study by ‘nesting’ studies of music and arts within them. Iversen also uses music as a tool to understand brain and body mechanisms underlying music perception and interpersonal cooperation, focusing on the role of the motor system in shaping perception. After undergraduate studies in physics at Harvard, he received an M.Phil. in history and philosophy of science at Cambridge and a Ph.D. in speech and hearing science from MIT.
Contact: McMaster University, Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour (Bldg 34), Rm. 111, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L8, Canada.