Lee Bartel, PhD

Lee is Professor Emeritus of Music and former Associate Dean of Research at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto and was founding Director of the Music and Health Research Collaboratory.  He is a former board member of the Collaborative Program in Neuroscience, cross-appointed to the Institute for Life Course and Aging, to the Rehabilitation Science Institute, and a participant in the Collaborative Program in Musculoskeletal Science all at the University of Toronto.

He is the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for KKT International with clinics in 13 countries using focused vibroacoustic treatment on orthopaedic spinal conditions. Lee is also Co-Chair of the Board and Chair of the Research and Development Committee for the Room217 Foundation devoted to music care in long-term care contexts.

Ana Katušić, PhD

Ana received her Bachelor and Master in Education and Rehabilitation Sciences and her PhD in Neuroscience at the Croatian Institute for Brain Research from the University of Zagreb. Currently she works in the day care Centre for Rehabilitation with neurologically challenged young infants and children.

Her special interest lies in vibroacoustic therapy (VAT) and neurological music therapy (NMT) in sensorimotor rehabilitation and visual attention. She is intensively involved in studying the effects of VAT on motor performance and oculomotor control.

Eha Rüütel, PhD

Eha has a PhD in Psychology and is professor of Creative Arts Therapies at Tallinn University, Estonia. In addition to serving on several boards (incl. The Board of the school of Natural Sciences and Health at TU; Representative of Tallinn University in ECArTE [European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education]) and being the former editor of the scientific journal Res Artis of the Institute of Fine Arts of Tallinn University, her research focus lies in Culture and Society, Psychology, Body image and dissatisfaction, therapeutic use of arts, and relationship between health and artistic and creative activities among others.

Heidi Ahonen, PhD

Heidi has been a Professor of Music Therapy at Wilfred Laurier University (CAN) since 2001 and director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad Institute for Music Therapy Research since 2003. She has worked in the North Karelia Polytechnic in Finland and established their music therapy programme there. She also trained music therapists at the Sibelius Academy, Finland, and psychotherapists at the Finnish Mental Health Association, Psychotherapy Institute.

Heidi has lectured and conducted experimental workshops in the health care community and various universities both in Europe and North America. Her research interests include group analytic music therapy, clinical improvisation, and evidence-based Music Medicine research, i.e. low-frequency sound wave research.

Richard Shusterman, PhD

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and director of the FAU Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. He was educated at Jerusalem and Oxford and was chair of the Temple University Philosophy Department before coming to FAU in 2005. He has held academic appointments in Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, and Hiroshima, and was awarded senior research Fulbright and NEH fellowships. Since 2002, he has been a certified Feldenkrais somatic practitioner.

Shusterman’s widely translated works cover topics in the human and social sciences with particular emphasis on questions of philosophy, aesthetics, culture, language, identity, and embodiment and he has authored several books including T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (Columbia), Practicing Philosophy (Routledge), Performing Live (Cornell), Surface and Depth (Cornell), Pragmatist Aesthetics (Blackwell, 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, and translated into 14 languages), and Body Consciousness (Cambridge University Press) and Thinking through the Body (Cambridge University Press).

His non-technical essays have been published in The Nation and The Chronicle of Higher Education and in various art reviews and catalogues, such as Artpress and Dokumenta. His illustrated novella, The Adventures of the Man in Gold, was published by Hachette in 2017.

Frank Bosco, PhD

Frank works in private practice as a body-oriented music psychotherapist. As such he is constantly attending to the interaction between thought and sensation in his client’s process. His work is a synthesis of theories and methods from various approaches to mental and physical health drawn from three fields: psychotherapy (mainly the gestalt therapy approach), music therapy, and body-oriented therapy.

The foundation of his approach rests in philosophical, scientific, and metaphysical understandings that support the notion that life energy is a vibratory phenomenon that correlates to music and sound.

Olav Skille

Olav Skille, born 1939 in Norway, studied at Bergen, Lærerhøgskole 1959–1962 to be music teacher. Specialisation studies at the University of Trondheim 1972 included brain injuries. He was a primary school teacher and headmaster at several schools and institutions in Norway, retiring in 2002. He received a scholarship from the Norwegian Department of education to research the therapeutic effects of music education in Norwegian special educational needs schools and a grant from the Nordic Council 1972 to find the prognostic possibilities of The Music Behavior Scale (MUBS) – a Nordic research team that included the Swedish, Danish and Finnish Ministries of Education.

He created the Music Bath which was later renamed Vibroacoustic therapy (VAT). Olav also participated in several international congresses and was invited to lecture on VAT in Singapore, Calcutta, Rome, London, Tallinn, Pescara, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and in the Nordic countries. He is a member of the VIBRAC core group and founder and president of the International Society for VibroAcoustics (ISVA) and a member of the scientific committee of the International Society for Music in Medicine (ISMM). He spends his retirement in Finland and remains active within the VIBRAC centre.

Ralph Spintge, Dr. Med.

Ralph is the director of the Regional Pain Centre DGS at Sportklinik Hellersen; Luedenscheid, and director of the Institute for Music Research IMUR, Plauen, Germany. Board Certified for Anesthesiology, Painmedicine and Occupational Health, Lifetime Professor for MusicMedicine and lecturer within the Music Therapy Master Course at the Institute for Music Therapy at the University of Music and Drama, Hamburg; former Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Music Research, University of Texas at San Antonio, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Music and Medicine IAMM publications.

Beginning in 1977 Spintge conducted a series of psychophysiological studies about the anxioalgolytic effects of music in Surgery, Anaesthesia, PainTherapy, Obstetrics, and Dentistry at various institutions such as the University of Hirosaki, Japan, University of Vienna, Austria, Erasmus University Rotterdam,The Netherlands, New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music Sydney, Australia, and several German university hospitals. He was co-investigator within a 10-year research programme on ”Rhythmicity, Heart Rate Variability and Cardiorespiratory Variability: The Neurovegetative Status in Man” in co-operation with the German Max-Planck-Society, based on a grant from Sporthilfe e.V.

His current research focuses on various medical areas such as chronic pain, stress, dementia, and others. Spintge’s publications comprise numerous articles and 22 books about innovations in anaesthesia and pain medicine, as well as applications of medicofunctional music.

He is a founding member (1982) and currently President of the International Society for Music in Medicine (ISMM), honorary member of The International Association for Music and Medicine (IAMM), member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), the German Society for Medical Psychology, and an Honorary Member of the Music Therapy Association of Catalonia/Spain.