Aniruddh “Ani” Patel is a Professor of Psychology at Tufts University, where he studies the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of musicality. He is the author of Music, Language and the Brain, and contributed a chapter on evolution and animal responses to music to Renée Fleming’s Music and the Mind: Harnessing The Arts for Health and Wellness. Patel will close the week for the Chautauqua Lecture Series focusing on “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music” by discussing his work in music cognition: the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and responding to music.

At Tufts, Patel’s areas of emphasis include music-language relations, rhythmic processing, and cross-species studies of music cognition, with research methods including brain imaging, behavioral experiments, theoretical analyses, acoustic research, and comparative studies with nonhuman animals. In addition to 2008’s Music, Language, and the Brain, which won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, Patel presented a 2015 lecture series for The Great Courses, titled “Music and the Brain,” which reached a wide audience.

Patel has served as president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and is a member of the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Prior to joining Tufts he worked at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, a research institute led by the Nobel Laureate Gerald M. Edelman, where he was a Senior Fellow from 2005 to 2012. Patel’s evolutionary research has been supported by fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Patel received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and his master’s degree from Harvard University, where he also earned his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, working with Edward O. Wilson and Evan Balaban.