IN SHORT
Bio Sketch
David Michael Greenberg, PhD, MPhil, MA (born Yeshaya David Meir in Hebrew) is an award-winning American psychologist, social neuroscientist, musician, and entrepreneur. He is well-known for his scientific work on musical preferences and personality, the social neuroscience of music, music therapy, and autism. He has received honors from the National Institutes of Health and the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Greenberg is the founder and CEO of the healthtech start-up Musical Universe Inc., which connects people worldwide to diagnostic screening and telehealth music treatment.
Greenberg was a senior scientific advisor/consultant for companies such as Spotify, National Geographic, and Channel 4. Spotify utilized Greenberg’s prior music and personality theory and research to Spotify users, publishing and patenting their findings, and leading to Spotify Wrapped.
He is also noted for undertaking massive big data studies, including the largest cross-cultural study on music, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2022, which found that musical preferences and personality are associated in universal patterns in over 50 countries. Greenberg also conducted the largest study on autism published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, and the largest study on theory of mind (i.e. cognitive empathy), which was published in 2022, also in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He is currently an honorary research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre in the Department of Psychiatry. He raised $1.7 million for the first statewide randomized controlled trial of improvisational music therapy in autistic children, which he is helping to lead,. Greenberg now serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Music Therapy and Musicae Scientiae. He routinely appears as a guest on BBC, NPR, and other media outlets. Greenberg is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences within the Daniel Turnberg Scheme.
Born in New York, Greenberg was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Greenberg studied psychology at Rutgers University (where he graduated with highest honors), music performance at Mason Gross School of the Arts, and aesthetics at the University of Milan in Italy via the Euroscholars Program. During his undergraduate studies, he completed two honors theses: one on the philosophy of music and the other, a psychobiography of John Coltrane under the supervision of George Atwood, for which he received an award for the best honors thesis.
He graduated first in his class with an MPhil in social and developmental psychology from the University of Cambridge. Then, funded by the International Cambridge Trusts, he obtained his PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he was supervised by Jason Rentfrow, advised by Michael E. Lamb, and collaborated closely with Simon Baron-Cohen.
Before becoming a Zuckerman Fellow in social neuroscience at the Gonda Brain Sciences Center at Bar-Ilan University, he received postdoctoral training in clinical psychology from the City University of New York, and in music therapy from Anglia Ruskin University. Greenberg received additional training and worked at the New York University Child Study Center and the National Institutes of Health, where he was advised by the prominent personality psychologist, Dr. Robert R. McCrae.
ORIGIN STORY
“When I was two weeks old, I had a birth defect and was in the hospital for a month. One day, when the nurses sent my parents home to rest, my poppy (grandfather) volunteered to stay with me in the ICU. During that day, the nurses told my parents that my poppy had spent the whole day singing religious and ethnic songs to me. Years later at the age of 27, I spontaneously began to sing a particular song over and over in my head, called Lecha Dodi. I could not get the song out of my head for months. I soon came across an old home video of my poppy holding me after I had come out of the hospital. He turned to the camera and said, “Do you want to hear David’s favorite song”, and he began to sing Lecha Dodi, the same song that I had been singing over and over in my head 27 years later. I intuitively know that through his singing, music helped save my life. For this reason, I have been on a mission to improve lives through music.”
