Where Are They Now?

See what some of our MaHRC graduates are doing today.

Thenille Braun Janzen, PhD

Dr. Thenille Braun Janzen completed her postdoctoral research fellowship at MaHRC in June 2018. During her fellowship, she coordinated the development of clinical research projects investigating the application of music-based interventions in collaboration with hospitals and research centres such as the Canadian Biomarker Integration Network in Depression (CAN-BIND), Wasser Pain Management Centre at the Sinai Health System, and Arthur Sommer Rotenberg (ASR) Chair in Suicide and Depression Studies at St. Michael’s Hospital. Since completing her fellowship at MaHRC, Thenille was awarded a fellowship from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre of Mathematics, Computation, and Cognition at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in Sao Paulo/Brazil.

Lauren Cole, PhD

Lauren Cole, PhD, MT-BC, NMT-F, is a senior coordinator with Dr. Michael Borrie’s Cognitive Clinical Trials Group, and for the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA). She completed her doctoral studies in Music and Health Sciences with a specialization in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. Her research interests focus on advancing the understanding of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, with a particular emphasis on exploring the therapeutic potential of music as a non-pharmacological intervention.

Catherine Haire, PhD

Catherine Haire, PhD, MT-BC, MTA, NMT-Fellow, recently completed a PhD in Music and Health Sciences, and the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience. For her dissertation, she conducted a large, randomized-controlled clinical trial examining the efficacy of Therapeutic Instrumental Music Performance, a Neurologic Music Therapy technique, and motor imagery in chronic, post-stroke upper-extremity rehabilitation. She plans to continue with research and clinical practice that focusses on motor, cognitive, and affective aspects of stroke rehabilitation.

Cheryl Jones, PhD, Registered Psychotherapist

Cheryl maintains a full-time clinical practice in Ottawa, Ontario, working with individuals who have sustained an acquired brain injury (ABI). She is also working in palliative care. For the past several years she has been a course instructor in the music therapy departments at Wilfrid Laurier University and Concordia University and is regularly an invited guest lecturer at universities and conferences regarding her work in Neurologic Music Therapy. She has recently published and is involved in a number of Neurologic Music Therapy projects. Her research interest is music-based cognitive rehabilitation following ABI. Cheryl was an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Miami from 2021/2022. 

Kyurim (Kyu) Kang, PhD

Kyurim Kang, Ph.D., MT-BC, NMT is currently a postdoc fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Music & Medicine. She holds a Ph.D. in Music and Health Science, and the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience from the University of Toronto. Her ultimate research goal is to bridge the gap between scientific evidence-based music research and clinical practices. She has been also working as a music therapist in the U.S. and in South Korea with various clinical populations.  

Tristan Loria, PhD

Tristan completed his PhD in Kinesiology at the University of Toronto in 2019, where he examined sensory processing during upper-limb reaching. His main research interests include visuomotor control, therapeutic musical instrument playing, and rehabilitation. Tristan’s postdoctoral work in the MaHRC lab focused on the use of percussive training for upper-limb rehabilitation following stroke and optimization of motor learning in performance. Tristan has been appointment Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at Washington State University in 2023.

Marija Pranjić, PhD

Marija Pranjić, PhD, MT-BC, NMT-F, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and an Instructor in Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Division. She completed her doctoral studies in Music and Health Sciences with a specialization in Neuroscience at the University of Toronto. Her research lies at the intersection of music, neuroscience, and developmental medicine, with an emphasis on brain-behavior associations underlying rhythmic timing vulnerabilities and the influence of music-based interventions on brain development. Her work has been supported by the GRAMMY Museum Grant, Harvard’s Interdisciplinary Mind Grant, the MITACS Globalink Research Award, and the Kimel Family Scholarship in Pediatric Neurorehabilitation.

Nicole Richard, PhD

Originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Nicole Richard is an Instructor of Music Therapy at Belmont University in Nashville, TN, and an Assistant Faculty for the Academy of Neurologic Music Therapy. She has a Master of Arts in Music and Health Sciences with a Collaborative Specialization in Neuroscience from the University of Toronto (2018), and a Bachelor of Music Therapy from the Canadian Mennonite University (2014). Nicole is researching telehealth music therapy for autistic children, as well as the impact of music on movement timing in autistic individuals. She has presented her research at many regional and national music therapy and music cognition conferences in Canada and the U.S., and her work has been published in journals such as Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience and NeuroRehabilitation.

Charlene Santoni, PhD

Dr. Santoni completed her doctoral degree under the supervision of Dr. Michael Thaut and Dr. Tim Bressmann. Her research explored ways of influencing oral-nasal balance in speech and singing in typical speakers and speakers with hypernasality. Her work earned publication in the Journal of Voice, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica and The International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology. She is currently collaborating on follow-up research further investigating hypernasal speakers’ regulation of oral-nasal balance at Stollery Children’s Hospital’s Cleft Lip and Palate Clinic in Edmonton, Alberta. During her doctoral program, Charlene also co-authored a chapter on music-inspired speech and language rehabilitation that is featured in the Oxford Handbook of Music and the Brain. Currently, Charlene is a sessional singing voice instructor at McMaster University, a guest lecturer at The University of Toronto, and a newly appointed assistant faculty member at The Academy of Neurologic Music Therapy. She also maintains a private voice studio where she offers advanced singing training, singing voice rehabilitation services, and vocal intonation therapy. For more information about Dr. Santoni, you can visit her website: www.charlenesantoni.com.

Vivek Sharma, PhD

Vivek Sharma completed his thesis on language processes of absolute and relative pitch musicians at the Rotman Research Institute under professors Michael Thaut and Claude Alain. His recent publications are concerned with abstract information processing, neural plasticity and human voice perception, which has contributed to characterizing encoded neural representations in expert musicians. Vivek is now working on publishing his work in the context of sensory enhancement and phonemic processing of the sung voice, which he hopes will benefit melodic intonation therapy for aphasia by preferentially selecting phonemes that are conducive to interhemispheric mimicking after stroke. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children under Dr. Darren Kadis, where he is studying the rapid decrease of aphasic post-surgical neural pathology in pediatric epilepsy patients. In his spare time, he continues to perform on the guitar and is an avid songwriter who also enjoys computer coding, which he uses to collaborate on projects with health industry partners.