Computational neuroscientist and singer\/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who also plays electric bass and guitar, says music has been a core part of her life for as long as she can remember. She grew up in a musical family and played in bands all through high school.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor most of my life, writing and playing music was the clearest way I had to express myself,\u201d says Lecamwasam. \u201cI was a really shy and anxious kid, and I struggled with speaking up for myself. Over time, composing and performing music became central to both how I communicated and to how I managed my own mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along with equipping her with valuable skills and experiences, she credits her passion for music as the catalyst for her interest in neuroscience.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got to see firsthand not only the ways that audiences reacted to music, but also how much value music had for musicians,\u201d she says. \u201cThat close connection between making music and feeling well is what first pushed me to ask why music has such a powerful hold on us, and eventually led me to study the science behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lecamwasam earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in 2021 from Wellesley College, where she studied neuroscience \u2014 specifically in the Systems and Computational Neuroscience track \u2014 and also music. During her first semester, she took a class in songwriting that she says made her more aware of the connections between music and emotions. While studying at Wellesley, she participated in the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program for three years. Working in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences lab of Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, she focused primarily on classifying consciousness in anesthetized patients and training brain-computer interface-enabled prosthetics using reinforcement learning.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still had a really deep love for music, which I was pursuing in parallel to all of my neuroscience work, but I really wanted to try to find a way to combine both of those things in grad school,\u201d says Lecamwasam. Brown recommended that she look into the graduate programs at the MIT Media Lab within the Program in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), which turned out to be an ideal fit.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing I really love about where I am is that I get to be both an artist and a scientist,\u201d says Lecamwasam. \u201cThat was something that was important to me when I was picking a graduate program. I wanted to make sure that I was going to be able to do work that was really rigorous, validated, and important, but also get to do cool, creative explorations and actually put the research that I was doing into practice in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Exploring the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of music<\/strong><\/p>\n Informed by her years of neuroscience research as an undergraduate and her passion for music, Lecamwasam focused her graduate research on harnessing the emotional potency of music into scalable, non-pharmacological mental health tools. Her master\u2019s thesis focused on \u201cpharmamusicology,\u201d looking at how music might positively affect the physiology and psychology of those with anxiety.<\/p>\n