Wednesday, March 23, @ 12 noon:

The Lyceum Committee welcomes Dr. Assal Habibi to discuss, “The brain’s crescendo: How music training impacts child development.”

This event is on Zoom, register in advance for this meeting:

https://vccs.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYrcOmqqD8oH9TRz8Q9tHOP8VdCh930YTRn

Assal Habibi is an Associate Research Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California. Her research takes a broad perspective on understanding music’s influence on health and development, focusing on how biological dispositions and music learning experiences shape the brain and development of cognitive, emotional, and social abilities across the lifespan.

She is an expert on the use of electrophysiologic and neuroimaging methods to investigate human brain function and has used longitudinal and cross-sectional designs to investigate how music training impacts the development of children from under-resourced communities, and how music generally is processed by the body and the brain.

Her research program has been supported by federal agencies and private foundations including the NIH, NEA and the GRoW @ Annenberg Foundation and her findings have been published in peer reviewed journals including Cerebral Cortex, Music Perception, Neuroimage and PLoS ONE. Currently, she is the lead investigator of a multi-year study, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and their Youth Orchestra program (YOLA), investigating the effects of early childhood music training on the development of brain function and structure as well as language skills, cognitive, emotional, and social abilities. Dr. Habibi is a classically trained pianist and has many years of musical teaching experience with children, a longstanding personal passion.