Melanie Ambler

Melanie is a fourth-year medical student at Stanford School of Medicine, a cellist and aspiring physician-artist. Her passions lie at the intersection of music and medicine. She attended Brown University, earning a degree in Neurobiology with honors in 2019 and subsequently moved to Caen, France as a Fulbright Fellow to pursue a master’s in Neuroscience and study the effect of music on patients with dementia. She is the recipient of the Rosalind Swenson Enrichment Award from the French Fulbright Commission for her work in providing virtual concerts to nursing homes in France during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, she also played one-on-one virtual concerts for over 200 critically ill patients as a “musician on call” with the non-profit, Project: Music Heals Us.

In 2024, she started Musical Rounds, a music and storytelling project for patients in palliative care. To support this work, she has been awarded a MedScholars Research Fellowship from Stanford School of Medicine, a Community Health Equity grant from Stanford and Resonance Fellowship, a music professional development fellowship, from the Honeywell Arts Academy. Her research has been featured in journals such as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Academic Medicine and JAMA Internal Medicine and has been featured on the award-winning medical storytelling podcast, The Nocturnists. Outside of medicine and music, she loves going for hikes in the Bay Area and making creative waffles.