Biography

Yale-trained molecular biochemist and internationally acclaimed concert pianist Dr. Mei Rui has built an exceptional career at the intersection of music, medicine and neuroscience. She is Founder and Director of Music-in-Medicine and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at MD Anderson, where she leads pioneering research into the neurophysiological effects of music on the human brain and body.

As a principal investigator, she directs large-scale, multimodal clinical trials examining the impact of music on perioperative and intraoperative stress, recovery, brain health, cognition and peak human performance. Her research has appeared in leading publications including Surgery, JMIR and The Lancet. She also founded an innovative in-hospital concert series that combines live musical performance with the collection of neurophysiological data from patients, physicians and musicians.

Alongside her scientific work, Dr. Rui maintains a distinguished international career as a concert pianist. A prizewinner at major international competitions, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Louvre Auditorium, the National Concert Hall in Taipei, the Beijing Concert Hall and Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, and has appeared at festivals including Ravinia, Yellow Barn, Taos and the Music Academy of the West.

Her work increasingly brings the concert stage and the laboratory together through neuroconcerts incorporating brain-computer interfaces and real-time physiological mapping, creating new ways of observing and understanding what music does to performers and listeners.

At the XXI Cartagena Music Festival, Dr. Mei Rui brings science and artistic experience together to explore, through both evidence and listening, an essential question: what happens in our brains and bodies when we make and experience music?