This forum is a place to introduce yourself and get to know each other. I'll start!
My name is Emily and I'm a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. I'm originally from the US and a proud alumna of the Western Michigan University music therapy program, where I compelted by Bachelor's. I interned in a large public school system working mainly with children and young adults with developmental disabilities and got my MT-BC (board-certification as a music therapist) in 2011. I always particurly liked working with kids with autism. I ended up moving to Finland to my Master's degree in 2012, where I stayed to do my PhD, which I got in 2018. Most of my research has been about movement and music and used motion capture, but I've also done some survey research and I'm hoping to do a little more qualitative work in the next few years. I'm especially excited about the development of video-based and markerless motion capture systems.
I helped start MTFI because, although JYU does amazing music cognition research and music therapy research, I kept seeing opportunities for more collaboration and overlap which were being missed. People trained primarily in music therapy and people trained primarily in music research have so much in common, but we're often using somewhat (or very!) different language to describe the same things, so communication can be tricky. I hope that the more we get to know each other the more we'll get to know about each other's areas of expertise and find more ways to work together.
Unrelated things I really like: coffee, murder mysteries, cats (but I'm allergic), gardening (but I'm not much good at it), audiobooks, cooking, sleep.