Benjamine Liu ’12: Harnessing music to heal the mind

Benjamine Liu ’12 spent the summer listening to the powerfully therapeutic effects live music has on the mental health of both those with mental disorders and inmates in Los Angeles County jails. It was part of a program he designed with the help of the Davis Projects for Peace and the Street Symphony. When studying at Oxford next year, he hopes to learn how to make permanent those transitory effects of the program on the minds of the mentally ill.

“People with tremors, post-traumatic stress, people who heard voices, all received temporary shelter from the horrible symptoms that plagued them because of the music,” Liu said. “It has inspired me to look for a permanent cure.”

Liu of Westlake Village California. studied biology at Yale and researched the prefrontal cortex in Mark Laubach’s systems neuroscience lab. He is currently studying for a master’s in computational biology at Cambridge with a Paul Mellon Fellowship. He will pursue a doctorate in neuroscience at Oxford with the Rhodes Scholarship.

“By helping to sort out the billions upon billions of reactions in a functioning human brain, we will be better able to address crippling mental illnesses,” he said.

Liu also won a Goldwater Scholarship, the Josephine De Karman Fellowship, and Yale College’s highest honor, the Alpheus Henry Snow prize, for intellectual achievement and character. He has an extensive record of service, including public health experiences in the United States and abroad.

He hopes to pursue a career as a physician-scientist.

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