As a child, Nina Krauss' world was shaped by sound. She grew up in a family that spoke

two languages, both English and Italian. As a kind of citizen of two countries, I feel

much more like the intersection of these two languages and cultures than as an Italian

or an American, because I feel like I belong at the intersection.

And Nina's family communicated in another way as well, through the language of music.

Something that we did in our house as we sang together, you know, I learned to sing harmony,

I don't really know to this day how I do it, just like when a child learns language. So

sound was always important for me.

Nina still remembers playing with her toys underneath her family's piano, as her mother

practiced.

And yes, I still have that piano, I play it every day, my son played that piano when he

was a little boy.

But when Nina got to college, she found a new love, science. So she set out to find a way

to combine her love of music, love of language, and love of the brain.

And I thought, oh, I wanted to do this, want more biology. So the idea, even then, I realized

that I can combine language and biology. And sound is at this intersection.

And she did it. Today Nina is one of the leading experts in the field of sound. And she leads

a lab at Northwestern University called BrainVoltz, where she studies how our brains make sense

of all the sounds that surround us every day.

If you look at the homepage of our website, which I hope people do, you will see that we

research music and rhythm and bilingualism, reading, hearing loss, aging, concussion.

And you might wonder, what are they even doing in this lab?

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