The Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, Aniruddh D. Patel is a pioneer in the use of new concepts and technology to investigate the neural correlates of music. The goal of his research is to increase understanding of how the human brain processes structured sound. He has focused recently on the relationship between music and language, especially what the similarities and differences between the two reveal about each other and about the brain itself. His work employs a broad range of methods, ranging from brain imaging of syntactic processing to studying acoustical patterns to determine how a culture’s language is reflected in its instrumental music. A clarinetist as a youth, Dr. Patel earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with distinction at the University of Virginia, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After a year studying ecology at the National Taiwan University as a Luce Scholar, he went on to Harvard University, as a National Science Foundation Fellow, where he earned a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology in 1996. He did a joint postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and at Tufts University before joining The Neurosciences Institute as a junior fellow in 1997. Appointed an associate fellow three years later, Dr. Patel was named to his present position in 2005. He has held a grant from the Roger Tory Foundation to conduct ethnomusicology research in Papua New Guinea and a McDonnell-Pew Fellowship to attend a McDonnell Summer Institute in Cognitive Science at Dartmouth College. When teaching animal behavior as a graduate student at Harvard, he received a Danforth Teaching Award, and he continues to lecture in the Harvard Museum of Natural History Travel Program. Dr. Patel has delivered invited lectures throughout the United States as well as in Mexico, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, and Australia. The author or co-author of some forty papers published in scientific journals, he is also the author of the highly-praised Music, Language, and the Brain, which was published by Oxford University Press last year. His book, which Nature called “an intellectual tour de force,” is the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience and argues that these uniquely human abilities share deep and critical connections.