About
Touring Northwestern's beautiful music school with my family.
Touring NU's beautiful music school with my family.
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I’m on a gap year before college, exploring cognitive science, particularly music cognition. This website chronicles my independent research projects.
Interests
In college and beyond, I hope to help uncover the computational mechanisms behind the human capacity for music. I’m especially interested in pursuing this goal via two complementary paths: first, exploring how the syntactic structure of music might be represented in the vector spaces of neural networks; and second, using computational modeling and behavioral experiments to investigate the cognitive mechanisms that enable people to recognize music universally, even without any training.
Background
My music cognition research is part of a broader intellectual journey: exploring cognitive science during this gap year. To build methodological experience across the field’s core domains, I’m conducting three independent research projects, each rooted in a different discipline: psychology, computer science and neuroscience. To examine how diverse methods can illuminate the same question from different angles, all three projects center around a shared inquiry: How do minds and brains distinguish music from other sounds? My hope is that this year’s work will shape my academic path, guiding both my coursework and future research.
Bio
My interest in music cognition grew out of several long-standing passions: music (voice and piano), languages (I speak six), and STEM disciplines (especially math, physics and biology). I graduated in 2025 from a small but excellent rural high school in east-central Illinois, where I took four years of art and music appreciation, led the school choir for two years, and completed or self-taught myself eleven AP courses (mostly in math and science) along with two Stanford undergraduate math classes. That mix of deep music exposure and rigorous STEM training sparked my curiosity about how minds learn and represent music, leading me to this point.
Mentoring
In high school, I also enjoyed helping classmates with coursework, and during my final two years, the headmaster asked me to assist with college advising. That experience inspired me to found Mentor Illinois, a nonprofit aimed at expanding college access for high schoolers across the state, especially first-generation and low-income students navigating admissions. I believe supporting and training fellow learners is just as essential to the scientific process as asking good scientific questions, and that's why I plan to continue mentoring in college.