An associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis,
Petr Janata studies how music impacts neural processes at UC/Davis’s Center for Mind and Brain. He is currently using fMRI and EEG recordings to investigate music’s interaction with emotion and why people like different types of music. A graduate of Reed College, he earned a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Oregon in 1996. He served as a visiting assistant professor of biology at Reed for a semester before going on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago where he studied how birds learn to sing. Dr. Janata became a research assistant professor at Dartmouth College in 2000 and accepted his present position in 2004. He has studied at the University of Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship, held a fellowship at the McDonnell Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience at UC/Davis, and been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and by a John Templeton Foundation/Metanexus research grant. A former reviewing editor for Brain Research, he has published more than twenty-five papers in scientific journals or in volumes of collected works.