Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, PhD, is a Professor of Music at Princeton University, where she directs the Music Cognition Lab. Initially trained as a pianist, she turned to cognitive science to explore why music has such a powerful ability to transport the mind, studying how listeners experience imagination, memory, and emotion through sound.

Her work bridges music, psychology, and neuroscience, using experiments and listening studies to track how the brain processes music and how it shapes attention, memory, and emotion. In these studies, participants listen to carefully designed pieces of music while Dr. Margulis measures how they respond, what they remember, how their attention shifts, what they imagine, and how they feel, allowing her to isolate specific elements of music and understand their effects on the mind.

Dr. Margulis is the author of award-winning academic books, including On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, which received both the Wallace Berry Award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and recognized by the National Academy of Sciences and has been featured in outlets ranging from NPR’s All Things Considered to the BBC.

She has appeared as an expert contributor on Netflix’s Explained, where she explains how music affects the brain and helps translate research on music cognition for a broad audience.  Elizabeth served as President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition from 2017 to 2019, where she helped advance interdisciplinary research and guide the field’s direction. Transported is her first book for general audiences.

She holds a PhD and an MA from Columbia University and a BM from the Peabody Conservatory of Music.