Elizabeth H. Margulis

Elizabeth H. Margulis is Professor of Music and Acting Chair at Princeton University, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Studies in Musicology with affiliations in Psychology and Neuroscience. She directs Princeton's Music Cognition Lab, which brings together students and researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to explore questions at the intersection of humanities and sciences.

Her educational background includes a PhD and MA from Columbia University and a BM in piano performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University. As a trained pianist, she bridges performance practice with scientific inquiry in her research.

• PhD, Columbia University
• MA, Columbia University
• BM, Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University

Margulis's research focuses on the perception and cognition of music, particularly exploring aspects of musical experience that seem most powerful yet hardest to articulate. Her work spans musical daydreams, repetition in music, and the intersection of music with language and neuroscience. She uses experimental data to illuminate complex, subjective, and culturally situated aspects of music, revealing broader aspects of human cognition and behavior.

Her recent publications form a cohesive body of work examining how musical experiences shape and reflect cognitive processes, with particular emphasis on how repetition structures musical engagement and how musical daydreams reveal fundamental aspects of memory and imagination. These studies combine natural language processing with traditional musicological approaches to uncover both universal and culturally specific patterns in musical experience.

• Wallace Berry Award, Society for Music Theory
• Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers
• Ruth A. Solie Award, American Musicological Society
• Kavli Fellowship, National Academy of Sciences
• Graduate Mentoring Award, Princeton University

Margulis has received significant research funding including grants from the National Science Foundation (with Psyche Loui) and the Leverhulme Trust (with Kelly Jakubowski). She has been recognized for her exceptional mentorship with multiple university-level awards. As President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, she has fostered interdisciplinary dialogue between humanists and scientists.

Her Music Cognition Lab serves as a hub for collaborative research, bringing together students and faculty from music, psychology, neuroscience, and related fields to investigate fundamental questions about musical experience through both experimental and humanistic approaches.