Dr. Srishti Nayak

Feeling grateful for the mentorship and community that make things like this possible. Excited for what 2026 may bring!

Congrats to our honors thesis student @elizabethdaymzk.bsky.social for being a semi-finalist in the US Fulbright Student program!! More news about next steps will come next year. Couldn't be more proud of Elizabeth's musician to musician-scientist journey!!!

Congrats to Tara Henechowicz (now at @ibg.colorado.edu) for winning a (big!) trainee travel award to present our work at the Population Hearing Health Care Conference in Feb.

(she wrote the whole application while waiting for a flight - airport writing works! 😁)

🌿 SEEKING THRIVING MUSICIANS!

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So much amazing work from @drsrishtin.bsky.social and her team! Check out her thread for highlights!

What a productive year for the BHaSHa group at VUMC! I'm so grateful to be a part of this team.

Wondering what’s been going on in the Music Cognition Lab? Check out our latest newsletter! Community engagement updates, research studies for all ages, and even an end of year matching gift opportunity! 🎵🎉
mailchi.mp/vumc/2025yea...

NYAS Publications In the InCHORRRuS (Infant-directed (ID) Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy through Rhythmic Structure) framework, increased rhythmicity in ID speech and the beat-based m....

🎶 New paper! InCHORRRuS Framework: Infant-directed Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy through Rhythmic Structure
Led by Camila Alviar, we consider how caregivers modulate their communication to 👶, including through song: nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

10. Saved the biggest for last: my paper with Reyna Gordon, @norijacoby.bsky.social, @profsimonfisher.bsky.social and many others was published in Nature Communications, showing that adults' rhythm skills are associated with odds of language difficulties in childhood; + shared genetic influences.

9. We submitted and/or revised and resubmitted TWO papers on prosody perception data in over 1500 adults - one on the genetics of prosody perception; one on prosody, rhythm, and reading relationships. Led by now med student Jonathan Liu (Brown) and PhD student Alyssa Scartozzi

8. Based largely on phenome-wide genetic analyses led by PhD student Tanguy du Merac in "All of Us", I submitted a DP2 (R01 equivalent) grant proposal for future work! With Reyna Gordon, I also submitted an R01 (as Co-I)! I'm still tired from these two!

7. Our undergrad Jeffrey Eum (Neuroscience major) was awarded two summer fellowships from Vanderbilt, towards full-time summer work and part-time ongoing work in my group. Led by him, we will be presenting out findings from lab studies of musicality and hearing in aging (point 4), at AAS in 2026.

6. Also at SNL, @elizabethdaymzk.bsky.social presented her honors thesis work examining relationships between musical rhythm perception, speech rhythm perception, and speech perception in noise, in older adults. She put our prosody test ("TOPsy") to great use! Collab with Cyrille Magne (MTSU)

5. We presented at the Society for Neurobiology of Language (SNL) conference. Led by me, we did a deep dive into the usefulness of the new(ish) cognitive data in "All of Us", for answering questions about language, cognition, mental health, and brain health

4. We collected a lot of musicality, cognition, auditory & speech perception data in older adults, in the lab. Efforts led by our postbacc RA Will Hiser, and hons thesis student @elizabethdaymzk.bsky.social. Collab with Terrin Tamati (OSU) with helpful input from @jpeelle.bsky.social!

3. We published a Viewpoint piece (led by me) in JAMA-Otolaryngology sharing our thoughts on musicality's role in hearing health, and how this science can benefit from the larger genetic and evolutionary literature on musicality and human communication.

2. We presented at the American Auditory Society (AAS) conference. Led by now postdoc Tara Henechowicz (at IBG, CU Boulder), we showed genetic and phenotypic correlations between musicality and hearing outcomes in aging.

1. We presented at the Society for Biological Psychiatry conference in Toronto. Led by our postbacc RA Grace Schlicht, we analyzed the health records of Xk in "All of Us". People w/ speech-lang clinical codes were far more likely to have certain mental health codes.

Haven't used bluesky much yet but now is as good a time as any to start!

I lead the Behaviour, Health, Speech, and Hearing (BHaSHa) group in the Vanderbilt Music Cognition Lab, and this is a thread of 10 things I want to highlight from our work in 2025!

Photograph of researchers at their benches in the custom-built molecular biology labs of the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, with green trees of the forest outside visible through large windows in the background.

Come join us for a 4-year PhD on effects of rare gene disruptions involved in speech disorder, investigated in human neuronal models (via gene-editing, tissue culture, brain organoids, high-res microscopy, transcriptomics, epigenomics).
More info: www.mpi.nl/imprs-phd-fe...
#AcademicJobs #PhDJobs
🧬🧪

Yay! So glad to have been a part of this team. Go @drsrishtin.bsky.social et al!!

Congrats to @drsrishtin.bsky.social and team!!!

Musical rhythm abilities and risk for developmental speech-language problems and disorders: epidemiological and polygenic associations - Nature Communications Impaired musical rhythm abilities and developmental speech-language related disorders are biologically and clinically intertwined. Here, the authors explore the correlation between the two traits, finding evidence of epidemiological associations and genetic overlap.

New paper alert! Systematic epidemiological analyses of up to 39,000 people illuminate biological/clinical links between impaired musical rhythm abilities & disorders affecting speech-language development. International collaboration led by @drsrishtin.bsky.social, out in @natcomms.nature.com. 👇🧪