Julene Johnson, PhD
Dr. Julene K Johnson is a cognitive neuroscientist with an undergraduate degree in music. She is a Professor Read more... in the UCSF School of Nursing's Institute for Health & Aging and co-director of the Sound Health Network. She has a long-standing interest in studying music and health in both healthy aging and persons living with dementia. Her previous work investigated preserved music skills in persons with Alzheimer disease and understanding the relationship between brain and music recognition in various neurodegenerative diseases. In 2010, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Jyväskylä, Finland where she studied how community choirs help promote wellbeing among older adults. Funded by the National Institute on Aging, Dr. Johnson recently completed a large cluster-randomized trial that examined the effects of a community choir on the health and wellbeing of culturally diverse older adults. Dr. Johnson also examines the historical roots of music in nineteenth-century neurology and psychology literature, which helps frame interdisciplinary research questions about music, brain, and health. She is a co-author of the NEA Guide to Community-Engaged Research in the Arts and Health (2016). In her spare time, she plays the flute and kantele and sings in a community choir.
Charles J. Limb, MD
Dr. Charles Limb is the Francis A. Sooy Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the Chief of the Read more... Division of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at UC San Francisco. He is also the Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center at UCSF and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery. Dr. Limb has studied the neuroscience of musical creativity for the last 15 years as Principal Investigator of the Sound and Music Perception lab, first at Johns Hopkins University, and now at UCSF. Throughout his career, Dr. Limb has combined his interests in music, auditory science, and the clinical treatment of hearing loss in diverse ways relevant to education, learning, neural plasticity and higher order cognition. Dr. Limb has published papers in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and given talks at various scientific conferences. His work has received international attention and has been featured by National Public Radio, TED, National Geographic, the New York Times, PBS, CNN, Scientific American, the British Broadcasting Company, the Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress, the Sundance Film Festival, Canadian Broadcasting Company, the Kennedy Center, San Diego Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the American Museum of Natural History.
