Aniruddh D. Patel

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Aniruddh (Ani) D. Patel is a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University, where he conducts research on music and the brain in the Department of Psychology. His primary work is with humans, and more recently, he has also been studying how other animals process music as a window into the evolutionary foundations of music cognition.

At Radcliffe, Patel is writing a book about the evolution of music cognition, synthesizing research on how animals process music and theories of human gene-culture coevolution. The book will provide a coherent framework and research program for evolutionary studies of human musical behavior.

Patel received a BA in biology from the University of Virginia and a PhD in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. He is a past president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and, in 2016, was appointed a senior fellow in the Azrieli Program in Brain, Mind & Consciousness at CIFAR. His book, Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford University Press, 2008), won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow.

So You Think He Can Dance? (Harvard Gazette, 7/8/19)