New Clinical Year, New Intern Trainees, New Blogger!

Hello everyone! It's a new clinical year and the center is as busy as ever! Jacqueline is taking a break from blogging and has handed over her mantle to me. My name is Ming Low. I just completed the Level 1 Nordoff-Robbins training in June 2013, and I am currently the research/technology assistant for the center.

Many exciting things have happened since our last blog. The center just received the American Music Therapy Association's Arthur Flagler Fultz Award. It is a $15,000 research award in support of the center's ongoing research study on post-stroke recovery with NYU Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine's Motor Recovery Lab. This study aims to discover if a collaborative interdisciplinary music therapy and occupational therapy intervention can enhance upper limb functioning as well as psychological and social well being for patients post-stroke. We are now in the process of coding and processing the data we have collected and hope to publish and present the results of the study very soon!

Not only that, the center is still involved in research projects with children with autism spectrum disorders, evaluating changes in children's communicative interaction over their course of music therapy. Some of our preliminary findings can be found in Early Childhood Music Therapy and Autism spectrum Disorders, (Kern & Humpal, 2012). Another research project we are working on is a collaboration with the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. This study seeks to find out the effects of music therapy with the development of expressive and receptive communication of children with cochlear implants.

The Nordoff-Robbins Center continues its proud tradition of providing clinical training for fieldwork students, music therapy interns, and Nordoff-Robbins certification candidates. This year, we welcome yet another group of wonderfully talented and dedicated students, interns, and candidates from all around the world to the Nordoff-Robbins family.

Also joining our family are two social work interns from NYU's Silver School of Social Work to help us provide more comprehensive care for our clients and their families, and applied psychology students that assist us with video documentation of our clinical work.

I hope to update this blog more frequently this year, and invite other Nordoff-Robbins music therapists to guest-blog for us. Sessions start officially September 16th, and we are all excited to make music with our clients! Please do not hesitate to leave comments or contact us if you have any questions, comments, or ideas about what you'd like to know more about us. We would love to hear from you!

Thanks for stopping by,

Ming