brainmusic

Grace Leslie and Joel Swanson selected as Faculty Fellows

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 17:00:44 +0000

Grace Leslie and Joel Swanson selected as Faculty Fellows Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/20/2023 - 10:00

The Research & Innovation Office has announced the 2024 RIO Faculty Fellows cohort, including assistant professor Grace Leslie and associate professor Joel Swanson along with 14 other faculty members from departments and research institutes across the campus.

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The Sound of Silence

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 22:13:30 +0000

The Sound of Silence Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/10/2023 - 16:13

Grace Leslie, director of the ATLAS Institute's Brain Music Lab, is focused on the nexus between music, technology and neuroscience. She discusses how she and her students collaborate on research around non-verbal communication and empathy through the medium of music and art.

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ATLAS Institute Faculty Nationally Recognized for Radical Creativity and Invention

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:46:00 +0000

ATLAS Institute Faculty Nationally Recognized for Radical Creativity and Invention Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2023 - 10:46

Michael Kwolek

The National Science Foundation’s CAREER award is among the most prestigious honors supporting junior faculty doing outstanding work integrating research and education toward a meaningful social impact. The CAREER award is highly competitive and is a strong indicator of future research success.

Award criteria focus on intellectual merit and broad impact—the NSF awards academic role models who have a plan to explore a body of significant research in their field. This balance of the desire to educate students within a pursuit of deep inquiry toward a purposeful goal is the signature of CAREER award winners.

At ATLAS Institute, we are proud to have had five faculty members who have received CAREER awards out of the nine so far who have been eligible. This remarkable achievement speaks to the nature of our research community as one that empowers creative engineers to bring their full selves to their work.

Ben Shapiro, Computer Science (2015): Constructing Modern and Inclusive Trajectories for Computer Science Learning
Laura Devendorf, Information Science (2020): Investigating Novel Tools and Collaborative Programs for Smart Textiles Innovation at the Intersection of Engineering and Craft
Danielle Szafir, Computer Science (2021): Developing Perceptually-Driven Tools for Estimating Visualization Effectiveness
Grace Leslie, Music (2022): Multimodal Brain and Body Music Interfaces to Promote Entrainment, Connection, and Creative Science Education
Carson Bruns, Mechanical Engineering (2023): Intradermal Biocompatibility of Nanoparticles as Minimally Invasive Implants for Human Health

ATLAS Director Mark D Gross explains faculty hiring: “Rather than saying, ‘We specifically want to hire a brain scientist,’ we say, ‘We just want to hire a really brilliant person.’ We seek applicants who are interesting to us and who are going to do great work. We believe in them.”

The power of the research

The ��«��Ƶ is one of only 35 U.S. public research institutions in the Association of American Universities (AAU), a group widely recognized as America’s leading research universities. This emphasis on research undergirds everything we do at CU-��«��Ƶ overall and at ATLAS specifically.

ATLAS Institute is housed under the Research & Innovation Office at CU-��«��Ƶ, with degree programs in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), itself a heavily decorated and high-ranked college. ATLAS contributes to the research rigor CEAS is known for while pushing the community’s perception of where serious inquiry can spring from.

For example, recent CAREER recipient and ATLAS assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Carson Bruns, studies new ways to apply nanotechnology for improving human health—but through the lens of “smart” tattoos that can change color with UV light exposure or temperature increases. This melding of disparate lines of interest—nanoparticles, smart technology, human health and body art—seeds unique, useful discoveries traditional methods might otherwise overlook.

Why ATLAS?

So what is it exactly about ATLAS that attracts such talent? Gross says, “Those who know what we're doing tell us we have a really interesting group of people, we’re unlike a traditional department, we’re very interdisciplinary, we blend fields, we’re open to change. Those are the kind of things that attract the people we hire.”

The term “interdisciplinary” refers to work in two distinct academic fields of study. At ATLAS, we push this notion further, to expand boundaries, to cross-pollinate and change how we think about thinking—deep, focused research into highly specialized topics is essential, but equally important is our ability to investigate ideas across a wide range of fields.

ATLAS faculty have a different way of thinking about problems, one that sparks teams to come up with novel solutions. Despite this often unexpected approach, their research is grounded in the real world, in designing tangible things and in creating tools for others to expand on the core idea. Consider the work that Laura Devendorf, assistant professor of information science, undertakes in the Unstable Design Lab—she develops advanced software that opens the craft of weaving up to new possibilities of form and design, empowering artisans to push the medium forward.

We will continue to champion this expansive view of interdisciplinary research at ATLAS as a model for how polymaths can pursue research that would be unlikely to find a home in traditional settings, particularly in the fields of engineering and design. Our success in attracting CAREER-worthy talent proves the power of our approach to radical creativity.

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Can music heal? This artist and researcher wants to find out

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 18:11:39 +0000

Can music heal? This artist and researcher wants to find out Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/06/2022 - 11:11

Electronic musician, flutist and researcher Grace Leslie believes that music touches something deep in the human brain—a hardwired need, perhaps, to sit around a fire or in a concert arena and feel connected to the people around us. Humans have been making music for longer than we’ve lived in cities and grown crops. “In most cultures, it’s used to draw people together,” says Leslie.

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Electronic musician and music cognition researcher Grace Leslie joins ATLAS faculty

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 18:26:45 +0000

Electronic musician and music cognition researcher Grace Leslie joins ATLAS faculty Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/18/2022 - 12:26

The ATLAS Institute and the College of Music are delighted to welcome Grace Leslie to the CU ��«��Ƶ faculty this fall as an assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute with a tenure home in the College of Music. Leslie is an electronic musician and music cognition researcher committed to harnessing the expression granted by new music interfaces to better understand the link between music and emotion. Ultimately, she aims to employ musical brain-computer interfaces to promote wellness.

Leslie comes to ATLAS from Georgia Tech, where she established the Brain-Music Lab and served as an assistant professor of music technology. She recently received a prestigious CAREER award, which the National Science Foundation grants to early-career faculty who have demonstrated the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. As director of the ATLAS Brain-Music Lab, she aims to continue expanding this groundbreaking field of research.

Before joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Leslie completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, developing music neurofeedback systems for creative and therapeutic applications. She earned her PhD in Music and Cognitive Science from University of California San Diego, where she studied the expressive movements and brain dynamics supporting music engagement at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. She’s worked on psychoacoustic research and interactive sound installation projects at IRCAM in Paris, and Audio DSP and User Experience design projects for Sennheiser, Kyocera, and Motorola.

Grace Leslie's website

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