Dr. Melia Bonomo is a Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University. She received her B.S. in Physics from Dickinson College (2013), and her M.S. (2018) and Ph.D. (2020) in Applied Physics along with a university certificate in Teaching & Learning (2020) from Rice. She then completed postdoctoral training on a fellowship from the NIH National Library of Medicine at Rice before joining the faculty. Dr. Bonomo’s research interests lie at the intersection of the creative arts, science, and healthcare, with a focus on the underlying theory of how biological systems are organized. She has developed computational and theoretical methods to quantify brain activity, with application to music engagement and cognitive health, and to model sound encoding in the ear, with application to music processing in cochlear implants. In the classroom, Dr. Bonomo aspires to help students see that physics is interesting, accessible, and relevant to daily life. She enjoys sharing her own passion and fascination with how the natural world can be understood through the language of physics. In her free time, she loves traveling, biking, and creating biophysics-inspired art.