Melanie Ambler

I’m a professional cellist, fourth-year medical student at Stanford School of Medicine and the founder of Musical Rounds. My passions lie at the intersection of music and medicine. I attended Brown University, earning a degree in Neurobiology with honors in 2019 and subsequently moved to Caen, France as a Fulbright Fellow to pursue a master’s in Neuroscience and study the effect of music on patients with dementia. I received the Rosalind Swenson Enrichment Award from the French Fulbright Commission for my work in providing virtual concerts to nursing homes in France during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, I also played one-on-one virtual concerts for over 200 critically ill patients as a “musician on call” with the non-profit, Project: Music Heals Us.

In 2024, I founded Musical Rounds, a music and storytelling project for patients in palliative care. A hugeee thank you to all that have supported this work thus far: MedScholars Research Fellowship from Stanford School of Medicine, a Community Health Equity grant from Stanford, Honeywell Arts Academy Resonance Fellowship and Arnold P Gold Foundation Student Summer Research Fellowship. My research has been featured in journals such as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Academic Medicine and JAMA Internal Medicine. Outside of medicine and music, I love playing beach volleyball, going for hikes in the Bay Area and making creative waffles.