A team of Brown medical students recently won the 2025 Annual Assembly Early Career/Professionals in Training Scientific Research Podium Award for their research exploring how personalized music therapy can improve the experiences of patients undergoing infusion treatments.
The award, given by the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, recognizes innovative research by early-career medical students, residents and fellows in the field of hospice and palliative care.
Claire Lin ’23 MD’27, Diana Wang MD’27 and Ishaani Khatri ’21 MD’25 conducted the research at the Miriam Hospital, where they provided patients with access to a personalized Spotify playlist during treatment. The project investigated whether listening to curated music could help alleviate treatment symptoms like pain, nausea, anxiety and depression.
Patients completed surveys designed to evaluate their physical and emotional states before and after the intervention. The results, which the team said showed promising improvements in patient well-being, were later presented at the AAHPM conference.
“We weren’t even thinking about accolades, we were just doing this because we loved it,” Wang said. She added that the team was particularly encouraged by the enthusiasm expressed by other researchers and clinicians during the conference for their approach.
“At first, we just wanted to explore whether this intervention could work,” she said. “But when we presented our findings, we realized how many people were excited about it — other doctors, researchers, hospital administrators who wanted to bring this to their own institutions.”
The authors’ musical backgrounds also helped motivate their work.
Khatri is a pianist and former music therapy volunteer. During her time volunteering, she was particularly struck by how patients in hospital settings responded to different types of music. She noticed patients found the greatest comfort in familiar music, whether that was a Broadway tune, pop ballad or melody from Aladdin.
Lin’s belief in the therapeutic power of music is rooted in her own childhood, during which she played the violin for her grandmother who was battling pancreatic cancer.
“Her favorite song was ‘Amazing Grace,’” Lin said. “Even though it was a simple song on the violin and I had just learned it, it brought a lot of joy to her.”
For Wang, the connection between music and medicine became clear when she played in a regional symphony as a teenager. Her stand partner, a retired physicist with Parkinson’s disease, had a noticeable tremor — except when she played her instrument.
This experience later led her to study neurobiology and inspired her interest in how patients can benefit from the connection between wellness and healing.
Experts in music and medicine continue to recognize music as a powerful therapeutic tool. Kerry Devlin, a senior music therapist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Music and Medicine who was not affiliated with the study, said that music can lower heart rate, improve oxygen levels and help with anxiety.
“We have studies showing that even something as simple as playing a familiar tune can reduce instances of delirium in hospitalized patients,” she said in an interview with The Herald.
Despite increasing evidence of music’s benefits, Devlin said that the lack of integration into clinical settings is due to the lack of infrastructure or awareness in many health care institutions.
“We’re only just beginning to scrape the surface of what we know about how and why music is helpful, and how to optimize for the use of music in different clinical settings,” she added.
With their research gaining momentum, Lin, Wang and Khatri are working to make music therapy a standard feature at the Miriam Hospital. Their next steps involve collaborating with hospital volunteer coordinators to ensure that patients have continuous access to music, and they are hoping to expand the program to other hospitals and health care settings.
“Research doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Khatri said. “We do it to improve patient care, to find better treatments, and what’s exciting about this project is that we could directly see the impact it had on patients.”
