Kelly Jakubowski

Dr. Kelly Jakubowski is an Associate Professor of Music Psychology at Durham University's Department of Music. She co-leads the interdisciplinary Music and Science Lab and directs Durham's Centre for Research into Inner Experience. Her research focuses on music-evoked autobiographical memory, musical imagery, and cross-cultural music perception. Jakubowski holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has held academic roles including Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham and Visiting Lecturer at King’s College London. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and serves on editorial boards for Psychology of Music and Music & Science. Notable awards include the 2015 Hickman Early Career Researcher Award and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2018–2021). Her work explores music's cognitive and emotional impacts, with findings featured in media outlets like The New York Times and BBC.

Education:

• Bachelor’s in Music Performance (Baldwin Wallace University, USA)
• Master’s in Music Theory (Ohio State University, USA)
• MSc and PhD in Music Psychology (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Research Interests: Combines empirical, computational, and biological approaches to study music's role in memory, emotion, and imagination. Key areas include:
- The psychological mechanisms of earworms and involuntary musical imagery
- Cultural variations in musical timing perception
- The interplay between music and autobiographical memory retrieval
- Development of methods for analyzing music-evoked imaginings

Grants & Projects:

• Principal Investigator: Leverhulme Trust grant (2024–2026) on perceptual/cognitive constraints on music-evoked imagination
• Co-Investigator: AHRC grant (2023–2024) for digital skills training in music research

Awards:

• Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2018)
• Hickman Early Career Researcher Award (2015)

Labs/Teams: Leads the Music and Science Lab, fostering collaborations between psychologists, neuroscientists, and musicians to explore music's biological and cultural dimensions.