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Falling Walls Science Breakthroughs
Elaine Chew: Breaking the Wall to Musical Medicine
Falling Walls Foundation | Elaine Chew
How Music Information Research Explores New Cardiovascular Therapies
In the face of the pervasive threat of cardiovascular disease, which continues to claim lives globally, exploring innovative avenues for prevention and treatment is paramount. Music emerges as a non-pharmacological, non-invasive, scalable, and enjoyable method to influence vital aspects of our cardiovascular health, such as heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate variability, often with minimal side effects. Elaine Chew, a renowned operations researcher and pianist, serves as Professor of Engineering in the Department of Cardiovascular Imaging at King’s College London.
At Falling Walls, Chew will harness her background in mathematics to delve into the intricacies of how music impacts the heart and is pivotal for harnessing its potential in cardiovascular therapies, thereby alleviating the societal burden imposed by cardiovascular ailments.
LIVE EVENT; AVAILABLE VIA LIVESTREAM AND ATTENDANCE FOR SUMMIT PARTICIPANTS IN THE LECTURE HALL. RADIALSYSTEM, GROUND FL.
Elaine Chew, an operations researcher and pianist, is Professor of Engineering in the Department of Cardiovascular Imaging in the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, and in the Department of Engineering, at King’s College London. Born in Buffalo, NY, and raised in Singapore, Elaine studied music and computational maths at Stanford and proposed the spiral array model in her PhD at MIT. A pioneering music information researcher, she is forging new paths between music and cardiovascular science. She is PI of COSMOS, using citizen+data science to probe music structures created in performance, and HEART.FM, making tools and techniques to study how these structures affect cardiac response. Her work has been recognised by the ERC, PECASE, NSF CAREER, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
