Jessica Grahn has degrees in Neuroscience and Piano Performance from Northwestern University and a PhD from Cambridge University, England, in the Neuroscience of Music. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, and she has served as President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. She has received various awards for both her science and her outreach, including the Charles Darwin Award in Public Communication of Science from the British Science Association, an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario government, a New Investigator Award from CIHR, an Understanding Human Cognition Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the EWR Steacie Fellowship (now called the Arthur B. McDonald Fellowship) from NSERC.