Jamshed Bharucha

Jamshed Bharucha is President of Cooper Union. Prior to this, he was Provost and Senior Vice President of Tufts University and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Music and in the Medical School's Department of Neuroscience. Prior to Tufts he was the John Wentworth Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College, where he received the Huntington Teaching Award. His research is in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He was Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has served as a Trustee of Vassar College, where he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Alumnae & Alumni of Vassar College.

Biography and education

Jamshed Bharucha was born in Mumbai, India. His father Jal Bharucha, an engineer from Mumbai, and mother Elizabeth Bharucha (born Elizabeth Emily Robinson) a musician from Albany, New York, met at the University of Michigan. Jal Bharucha was the first engineer in India to employ computers in structural design, using an early facility at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in the 1960s. Elizabeth Bharucha was organist and choral director at the Scots Kirk (Church of Saints Andrew & Columba) and the All Saints Church in Mumbai. Jal and Elizabeth were founding members of the Bombay International School, from which Jamshed graduated.

Bharucha graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College where he majored in biopsychology (1978), then received an M.A. in philosophy from Yale University (1979) and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Harvard University (1983). He spent the 1982-83 academic year at Cornell University, working in the lab of Carol Krumhansl. At Harvard he worked with Stephen Kosslyn, William K. Estes and Roger Brown.

Bharucha studied violin with Adrian De Mello in Mumbai, received an Associate’s Diploma in violin performance from Trinity College of Music (London) in 1973 and then studied violin with Matthew Raimondi at Vassar. He was a member of the Bombay Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Joachim Buhler; the Vassar College Orchestra under the direction of Luis Garcia-Renart; the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra performing at Sanders Theatre under the direction of James Yannatos; and the Bach Society Orchestra of Harvard University.

Academic and administrative career

Dartmouth College

Bharucha spent most of his academic career at Dartmouth College, where he was the John Wentworth Professor and rose up through the administrative ranks, from Associate Dean for the Social Sciences to Deputy Provost to Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. He was the first Indian American to be named dean of a school at an Ivy League institution. While in the Dartmouth administration, he established the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center - the first teaching and research MRI facility outside a medical school, accessible to undergraduates, graduate students and faculty. His principal faculty appointment was in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, but he also taught in the Program in Linguistics & Cognitive Science and the Program in Electroacoustic Music (now called Digital Musics).

As an academic administrator, he launched initiatives on teaching and research, as well as their integration in the form of active learning, encouraging undergraduates to get involved in research with their professors.

Bharucha chaired a self-study committee on the future of computing, which made recommendations designed to build on Dartmouth's historic strengths in academic computing. The two principal recommendations have since been implemented via the creation of the Neukum Institute for Computational Science and the Dartmouth Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. Bharucha himself has developed two computer-based teaching tools: MindLab, which enables undergraduates to design and conduct experiments in cognitive psychology, and DartNet, which allows undergraduates to build and test simple neural net models. As Deputy Provost he oversaw the newly created Institute for Security Technology Studies and the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.

Tufts University

Bharucha moved from Dartmouth to Tufts in 2002 to assume the position of Provost & Senior Vice President. As Provost, he was the chief academic officer of the university, overseeing the seven schools, the Tisch College, the Institute for Global Leadership, the Fares Center and the Clinical & Translational Research Institute.

Bharucha's primary legacy at Tufts is raising its academic stature. He recruited deans and faculty that together have put Tufts on a steep upward trajectory. Among the senior thought leaders he helped recruit to Tufts are Vali Nasr, Nalini Ambady, Ray Jackendoff, Gina Kuperberg, Mathias Scheutz and Peniel Joseph. During his tenure, the volume of sponsored research has doubled, the average number of patents per year from research has doubled, and revenues from technology transfer and industrial collaboration have increased tenfold.

Bharucha launched the Summer Scholars program, which provides opportunities for undergraduate students to work on collaborative research with faculty across the university and its affiliated hospitals. He also launched the University Seminar, a cross-disciplinary course, open to undergraduate, graduate and professional students, focusing on a topic of global importance.

Additions to the campus during his tenure include the Granoff Music Center and the rebuilt Neuroscience Department at the Tufts School of Medicine.

He has published on the topic of higher education partnerships with Asia. At Tufts, he and Dean Harris Berman of the Tufts Medical School established a joint program in Public Health with the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India.

Cooper Union

Bharucha was appointed as the twelfth president of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art effective July 1, 2011.

Personal

He resides in New York City with his partner, Jessie Papatolicas, who is a non-profit management executive, and their two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Charles and Hudson. He is an avid Cricket fan and he enjoys playing in string quartets.

Honors and awards

Distinguished Achievement Award, Alumnae & Alumni of Vassar College (2005)
Undergraduate Teaching Initiative special award, Dartmouth College (2002)
Huntington Teaching Award, Dartmouth College (1989)

Public commentary

• Good Vibrations: The Science of Sound (with John Schaefer, Jacob Kierkegaard, Polygraph Lounge, Christopher Shera, Mark Whittle) World Science Festival, New York, June 3, 2010.
• Behind the Universal Language, Soundcheck (Radio interview with John Schaefer) WNYC, New York, June 12, 2009.
• Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus (with John Schaefer, Bobby McFerrin, Daniel Levitin & Lawrence Parsons) World Science Festival, New York, June 12, 2009.
• Reconciliation in Iraq (Interview with Barbara Macleod) New England Cable News, July 8, 2008
• Iraqi Leaders Find Common Ground in Secrecy (Interview with John Moroney) New England Cable News, April 28, 2008.
• The Library Café (Radio interview with Thomas Hill) WVKR, Poughkeepsie, NY.
• Grey Matters: Music and the Brain (Radio interview with Mandy Patinkin) Public Radio International, March 1998.
• The Mystery of Music: How it Works in the Brain (by Sandra Blakeslee) New York Times, May 16, 1995.
• Music of the Hemispheres (by James Shreeve) Discover Magazine, October 1, 1995.

Articles

Essays on higher education

• Bharucha, J.J. (2009). Overlapping crises. Inside Higher Ed, December 10.
• Bharucha, J. (2008). Cognitive dilemmas in higher education. In M.E. Devlin (Ed.), Futures Forum 2008. Cambridge, MA: Forum for the Future of Higher Education and NACUBO.
• Bharucha, J. (2008). America can teach Asia a lot about science, technology, and math. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54 (20), January 25, pp. A33-34.
• Bharucha, J. (2006). Squeeze a bit more from this sponge. Times Higher Education, September 8, p. 4. London: TSL Education.

John Brockman's World Question Center on edge.org:

• "Education as we know it does not accomplish what we believe it does", for the 2006 question: "What is Your Dangerous Idea?"
• "The globalization of higher education", for the 2007 question: "What Are You Optimistic About?"
• "Education as stretching the mind", for the 2008 question: "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?"
• "The synchronization of brains", for the 2009 question: "What Will Change Everything?"
• "The Internet promotes the synchronization of minds", for the 2010 question: "How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?"

Research papers (selected)

• Curtis, M.E. & Bharucha, J.J. (2010). The minor third communicates sadness in speech, mirroring its use in music. Emotion, 10, 335-348.
• Ambady, N. & Bharucha, J.J. (2009). Culture and the brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 342-345.
• Bharucha, J.J. (2009). From frequency to pitch, and from pitch class to musical key: Shared principles of learning and perception. Connection Science, 21, 177-192.
• Curtis, M.E. & Bharucha, J.J. (2009). Memory and musical expectation for tones in cultural context. Music Perception, 26, 365-375.
• Bharucha, J.J., Curtis, M. & Paroo K. (2006). Varieties of musical experience. Cognition, 100, 131-172.
• Janata, P., Birk, J., Van Horn, J. D., Leman, M. Tillmann, B. & Bharucha, J. J. (2003) The cortical topography of tonal structures underlying Western music. Science, 298, 2167-2170.
• Tillmann, B., Janata, P., & Bharucha, J.J. (2003). Activation of the inferior frontal cortex in musical priming. Cognitive Brain Research, 16, 145-161.
• Janata, P., Birk, J.L., Tillmann, B., & Bharucha, J.J. (2003). Online detection of tonal pop-out in modulating contexts. Music Perception, 20, 283-306.
• Janata, P., Tillmann, B., & Bharucha, J. J. (2002). Listening to polyphonic music recruits domain-general attention and working memory circuits. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 2, 121-140.
• Justus, T.C. & Bharucha, J.J. (2001). Modularity in musical processing: The automaticity of harmonic priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 1000-1011.
• Tillmann, B, Bharucha, J.J. & Bigand, E. (2000). Implicit learning of tonality: A self-organizing approach. Psychological Review, 107, 885–913.
• Tekman, H.G. & Bharucha, J.J. (1998). Implicit knowledge versus psychoacoustic similarity in priming of chords. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 24, 252-260.
• Bharucha, J.J. & Mencl, W.E. (1996). Two issues in auditory cognition: Self-organization of categories and pitch-invariant pattern recognition. Psychological Science, 7, 142-149.
• Bharucha, J.J., & Todd, P. (1991). Modeling the perception of tonal structure with neural nets. Computer Music Journal, 13, 44-53. (Reprinted in P. Todd & G. Loy (Eds.), Music and Connectionism (pp. 128–137). Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.)
• Bharucha, J.J. (1991). Pitch, harmony and neural nets: A psychological approach. In P. Todd & G. Loy (Eds.), Music and Connectionism (pp. 84–99). Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
• Bharucha, J.J. (1987). Music cognition and perceptual facilitation: A connectionist framework. Music Perception, 5, 1-30.
• Bharucha, J.J., & Stoeckig, K. (1986). Reaction time and musical expectancy: Priming of chords. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 12, 403-410.
• Bharucha, J.J. (1984). Anchoring effects in music: The resolution of dissonance. Cognitive Psychology, 16, 485-518.

External links

• President, Cooper Union
• Dartmouth College Cricket Club