Ellen is a Postdoctoral fellow in General Education in the Brain and Creativity Institute and the at University of Southern California. She is continuing her research on the neural correlates of music and social connection and teaching seminars on the Neuroscience of Creativity and Arts, Health, Community, and Technology. She earned her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the  Brain and Music Labwhere she studied the intersection of her two passions of neuroscience and the arts. A graduate of Muhlenberg College with a BA in Neuroscience and a BS in Theatre Performance, she spent several years as an arts educator and performer before working at Northwestern University as a clinical research coordinator studying the biomarkers of Parkinson’s disease using fMRI. 

Ellen is interested in the impact of shared experiences on wellbeing, including the arts and music. She specifically studies the ways music and interventions impact belonging and wellbeing across the lifespan.

Ellen has developed several courses including The Neuroscience of Creativity; Arts, Health, Community and Technology; Music and the Brain; and Psychological Science and Society.

She also has worked in Learning and Impact at HopeLab, where she utilized her skills working with quantitative and qualitative data to understand the impact of HopeLab’s work on youth mental health across theUS.

In her free time Ellen enjoys hiking and backpacking with her dog and partner, performing arts including acting, puppetry and singing, exploring new places as she travels the world, and the joy of watching her daughter grow up.