Faculty Q&A: David Greenberg, PhD

David Greenberg, PhD, is the Evans Lam Professor of Music and Medicine. Greenberg completed his postdoctoral training in Social Neuroscience at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He has a PhD in Psychology from Cambridge, where he also completed his master's in Social and Developmental Psychology. He attended Rutgers University and the Mason Gross School of the Arts, where he majored in Psychology and Jazz Performance. His research studies how music impacts people and how its effects could be turned into interventions for conditions like pain, depression, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Please summarize your research.

At the Music, Mind, and Medicine (3M) Lab at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, we study how and why music moves us, and how to turn those effects into medicine. We combine large-scale behavioral data with brain imaging and clinical trials to uncover the mechanisms behind music's effects on the brain and to build personalized, music based interventions (MBIs) and digital health technologies for conditions like depression, PTSD, and autism. The aim is precision music medicine that is evidence-based, individualized, and scalable.

How did you become interested in your field?

I came to science through music first. I’m a trained jazz saxophonist, and I spent years experiencing firsthand how music changes emotion, connection, and states of mind. There's also a personal thread: I spent time in a NICU as a two-week-old infant and was sung to by my grandfather—songs embedded in my memory to this day. Bridging art and science has driven everything since.

How do you use music to unlock/elevate our understanding of the human brain?

Music can engage neurological reward, emotion, memory, movement, and social bonding all at once, so a single naturalistic stimulus lets us study many brain systems at the same time. We quantify music using detailed feature extraction models and pair it with everything from largescale behavioral data to physiological synchrony and, here at URochester, intracranial recordings from patients. By mapping how specific musical features drive specific brain and body responses, we can understand the underlying mechanisms, and then use that knowledge to design targeted interventions.

What brought you to the University of Rochester?

URochester is one of the very few places on earth, perhaps even the only one, where a world-class medical center and a world-class music school live inside the same university. The Evans Lam Professorship of Music and Medicine, the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and Eastman Performing Arts Medicine (EPAM) Center gave me a rare opportunity to lead a program that harmonizes rigorous science with musical excellence all under one roof. Add the clinical reach of URochester Medicine and a genuinely collaborative culture, and it is the ideal place to help build the field of music and medicine.

Who do you collaborate with at URochester?

We have built collaborations across more than 20 departments at the University of Rochester. Including the Department of Neurosurgery, Department of Psychiatry, Wilmot Cancer Institute, Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Developmental Pediatrics, the Department of Sound Arts and Engineering, and the Eastman Institute for Oral Health.

What is your favorite piece of advice?

My favorite piece of advice: “Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein