School of Humanities and Sciences
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Vaidehi Natu
Physical Science Research Scientist, Psychology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a developmental neuroscientist. My research program aims to study how the human brain matures from infancy to adulthood, as it acquires new life skills and behaviors: What are the origins of neural and cellular mechanisms of brain development during infancy? How does the trajectory of cellular mechanisms unfold during development, as school-aged children acquire complex skills such as reading or face recognition? What are some of the parallels in brain development across primate species? What changes occur in the brain in developmental disorders such as autism, multiple sclerosis, and dyslexia.
I use a multi-modal approach by combining different techniques to study the brain. I use neuroimaging methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), quantitative MRI (qMRI), and diffusion MRI (dMRI) as well as behavioral observations, histology, comparative methods across humans and macaques, and intracranial electroencephalography. This combination of complementary techniques provides a unified understanding of how the brain’s anatomy, function, and behavior co-develop to achieve complex human skills. -
Ashkan Nazari
Ph.D. Student in Music, admitted Autumn 2023
Iranian Studies - Iran Media Projects, Iranian StudiesBioAshkan Nazari
M.A. Ethnomusicology, Tehran University of Art, Tehran
B.A., Music, University of Tehran, Tehran
A Kurdish-Iranian musician and researcher, Ashkan is currently an ethnomusicology PhD student at Stanford. He holds a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Tehran and a master's in ethnomusicology from Tehran University of Art.
Ashkan's more than 15-year-long research career has centred upon Kurdish classical and folk musics as well as Iranian classical music. The core area he is pursuing at Stanford covers the intersections between music, on the one hand, and genocide, war, violence, intellectual movements, Islam and Kurdish identity, on the other. His interest also includes the development of ethnographic studies of the relationship existing between maqām as a cultural-musical concept, with ethnicity, racism and colonialism.
In his quest to explore those realms, Ashkan has already been prolific back home, with three titles: The Concept and Structure of Maqām in Kurdish Music, The Structure of Musical Modes in Hawrāmi Music, the Anthropological Aspects of Maqām Music of Iraqi Kurdistan, with the latter set to be released soon. Many of his numerous articles have additionally appeared across prestigious Iranian journals, others presented at international ethnomusicology conferences.
As the founder and conductor of the first-ever philharmonic orchestra in his Kurdish hometown of Paveh, Ashkan also taught Iranian music theory and Iranian ensembles, while instructing setār performance and analysis of Iranian classical music at the University of Kurdistan and the University of Art and Culture in Kermanshah and Sanandaj, respectively.
