Laura Navarro

Since I was a child, asking and searching about the origin, cause and roots of a huge variety of biological, psychological or artistic phenomena, has been my character. I am curious by nature. This is the motivation behind my multidisciplinary professional career, which comprises studies as well as professional experience of art, history, music education, creativity, human development and project management. Recently, being part of a genetics research group is being a great opportunity to progress on learning, connecting various fields of human sciences, such as music and genetics. I took my BA in History of Art at the University of Zaragoza and also studied Musicology at the University of La Rioja. My professional career started off working on a conservation and management of cultural heritage project, a European fund supported program for rural development (CIDER Prepirineo). Thanks to this experience I was selected to enrol in a program run by the Spanish Agency for International Development and Cooperation (AECID) in Honduras, where I was responsible for managing different cultural projects (with artisans, historians, anthropologists and artists). At the age of eight, I started my piano studies and obtained my degree of Piano Teacher, and for ten years, I have been working as a music teacher mainly in Play Escola de Música (Santiago de Compostela). My beginnings in research activity were in my master thesis, in which I developed an empirical investigation about the development of compositional creativity through improvisation in piano lesson (University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid). I completed my doctoral dissertation in the same topic at the University of Granada, though following a different methodology, a mixed design (quantitative and qualitative) focusing on the development of creative process of children’s musical improvisation and the sociocultural factors that have affected. One of the main research instruments utilized is the Measures of Creative Thinking in Music (Webster, 1994), being the first time that this psychometric tool has been employed in Spain. Recently, I am involved in a totally innovative and ambitious research project. A study aimed to discover the biological bases and characteristic genes related to musicality and human disorders and the power. of musical stimulus in human genome (SENSOGENOMICS www.sensogenomics.com). I perform a double role: as a researcher studying the background of this complex topic and designing the experiments, and as a project leader coordinating both actions and team to reach our goals, subject recruitment and project management.