Robert Zatorre

I grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, obtaining my undergraduate degrees in music and psychology at Boston University, and my PhD in experimental psychology with the late Peter Eimas at Brown university. My postdoctoral training was with Brenda Milner at McGill, where I am currently professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute. My laboratory studies the neural substrates of auditory cognition. Together with my collaborators I have published over 280 scientific papers on topics including pitch perception, auditory imagery, perception of auditory space, and the role of the mesolimbic reward circuitry in musical pleasure. My research spans all aspects of human auditory processing, from the functional and structural properties of auditory cortices, to how these properties differ between the hemispheres, and how they change with training or sensory loss. My lab makes use of functional and structural MRI, MEG and EEG, and brain stimulation techniques, together with cognitive and psychophysical measures. In 2006 I became the founding co-director, with Isabelle Peretz, of the international laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound research (BRAMS), a unique multi-university consortium with state-of-the art facilities dedicated to the cognitive neuroscience of music that currently counts 69 members from around the world. In 2011 I received the IPSEN foundation prize in neuronal plasticity, in 2013 I won the Knowles prize in hearing research from Northwestern University, and in 2017 I was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. I am a classically trained organist, and live in Montreal with my wife and collaborator Virginia Penhune, professor of psychology at Concordia University.