New York, NY (Top40 Charts) The Sync Project, a global collaboration harnessing the scientific potential of music for health, today announced the appointments of Yadid Ayzenberg as Chief Technology and Product Officer and Dame Marjorie Scardino to its Board of Directors.
Recent pioneering research has shown that music can modulate neural systems like the dopamine response, autonomic nervous system, and others related to stress, movement, learning and memory. This research shows that music affects the same neural pathways that are regulated by pharmaceuticals such as psychostimulants and other drugs. Building on these latest scientific advances, the Sync Project aims to develop music as a personalized therapeutic for a variety of conditions including Parkinson's, pain, sleep disorders, fatigue, stroke recovery, anxiety and athletic performance.
The Sync Project works with some of the world's leading scientists to decode the health effects of music by providing them a platform to perform studies using biometric sensors and smartphones. The platform is designed for medical and health research, helping scientists, technologists and clinicians perform rigorous studies and potentially accelerate the discovery of the clinical applications of music with scientific validation.
"In our smartphones, we have access to all of our music and health data in one place. By combining these two data sets at scale, we can decode the personalized health benefits of music," said Sync Project CEO Marko Ahtisaari. "Marjorie is a tremendous addition to our board, bringing with her a wealth of proven business and leadership experience as well as a knowledge and deep interest in using technology to make learning and learning problems more individualized. Yadid will be an incredibly valuable member of our founding team. His technical expertise and insight into health data analytics will be instrumental as we develop music as personalized medicine."
Dame Marjorie Scardino served as Chief Executive of The Economist for 12 years and then Pearson plc, the world's leading education company, for 16 years. She is currently chairman of The MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the United States, as well as a member of non-profit boards including The Royal College of Art and The Carter Center, and for-profit boards including Twitter and PureTech Health.
Mr. Ayzenberg is a researcher in the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab, working on the application of new technologies to solve healthcare problems, and will be responsible for leading the development of the Sync Project platform. Ayzenberg's PhD research has focused on developing a platform that allows scientists to monitor and analyze massive amounts of health sensor data.
In addition to his pioneering work on health data analytics, Ayzenberg has spent over a decade leading software engineering teams across hardware and enterprise software. Before joining the MIT Media Lab, Ayzenberg oversaw all software research and development activities of the PMC-Sierra's optical communications devices after having founded the embedded software group of Passave Ltd, an optical communication startup acquired by PMC-Sierra. Earlier, at Comverse technologies, Ayzenberg led the core application team of an in-house startup that designed the world's first mobile social network. Ayzenberg has a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from the Ben-Gurion University in
Israel and an MBA awarded jointly from Northwestern Kellogg School of Management and Tel-Aviv University.
"The Sync Project is uniquely positioned at the convergence of music and health," said Ayzenberg. "There is mounting evidence on the health benefits of music, and The Sync Project will be studying these effects at scale. This is a huge opportunity."
About The Sync Project
The Sync Project, a PureTech Health company, is developing a platform to scientifically measure and study the effects of music on our health in areas like sleep, cognition, motor coordination and performance. The goal is to collect and correlate real-time biometric data and music, so that we can pinpoint and understand the health properties of music. Advisors include Robert Zatorre, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological
Institute at McGill University, Tristan Jehan, Founding CTO of The Echo Nest (Spotify), Hugh Forrest,
Director at South by Southwest (SXSW)
Interactive Festival, and Adam Gazzaley,
Director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center and Professor of Physiology, Psychology and Psychiatry at UCSF. The Sync Project's Board of Directors includes Dame Marjorie Scardino, Chairman of the MacArthur Foundation and former CEO of Pearson, Joi Ito,
Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Daphne Zohar, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PureTech. For more information visit syncproject.co and connect with us on Twitter.
