Kirsten Smayda, Ph.D.

Kirsten Smayda, Ph.D. is currently a Visiting Researcher at Boston University Sargent College and Applied Research & Data at MedRhythms, Inc., both positions held since 2021. From 2018 to 2021, they were a Senior Data Scientist and Data Scientist at Pear Therapeutics. From 2017 to 2018, they were a Fellow at Insight Data Science, where they worked with a local startup to understand the competitive space of social media presence. Kirsten built and tuned a preprocessing pipeline in R to clean raw Twitter data stored on AWS, and developed and tuned a sentiment algorithm to characterize tweets of competitor Twitter platforms. From 2013 to 2017, they were a PhD Graduate Researcher at The University of Texas at Austin, where they secured $80,000 from National Institutes on Aging to study effects of music training on speech perception in the older adult population, resulting in two publications. Kirsten also supported the development of an adult classroom curriculum for skill-development in music classroom, and conceptualized, implemented, managed, and analyzed over 20 studies on cognitive/perceptual learning, resulting in eight publications (one under review) and seven posters.

Kirsten Smayda, Ph.D. began their educational journey in 2007 when they graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor's in Arts and a Bachelor's in Music, specializing in Cognitive Psychology and Voice Performance. In 2011, they obtained a Master's Degree from The University of Texas at Austin in Music & Human Learning. Finally, in 2017, they completed their Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Cognitive Neuroscience from The University of Texas at Austin.