Theodoros Koustakas

External LIFE Fellow since 2025, MPI for Human Development

I am a predoctoral fellow at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the MPIB under the supervision of Ulman Lindenberger. My research interests revolve around structural and functional brain changes associated with musical training and expertise. As a musician myself, I’m also interested in how our brain hears and processes music and the diversity of music representation. My academic background is in Biology and Neurosciences. Ι received my bachelor’s degree in Biology at the Freie Universität Berlin and then specialized in Neurobiology and behavior during my master’s studies at the same university. In my master’s thesis, supervised by Elisabeth Wenger, I explored the neural representational space of diverse musical compositions and utilized acoustic features derived from the audio signal to further understand these representations. For my dissertation, I’m particularly interested in understanding the influence of singing on the brain development.