The AZA Lab, led by AZA Allsop, MD, PhD, principal investigator and assistant professor of psychiatry, received a Quartet Award from the New Haven Symphony Orchestra at its Garden Concert at The Estate in New Haven on May 15.
The Quartet Award honors people and organizations whose contributions have strengthened the symphony and broader New Haven community. The AZA Lab won the Quartet Award for Innovation.
The AZA Lab is a pioneering research lab at Yale School of Medicine dedicated to transforming the future of mental health through interdisciplinary innovation. The lab investigates how the brain is tuned by music, mindfulness, and psychedelics, integrating neuroscience, machine learning, and community-driven approaches to reimagine how individuals and societies heal.
With a mission to design transformative, culturally grounded mental health treatments, AZA Lab's work explores the neural basis of social behavior and develops new models that foster connection, empathy, and equity. Through its cross-disciplinary leadership and global arts-and-health partnerships, the lab is helping to reshape how psychiatric care is researched, designed, and delivered.
The lab and symphony collaborated on a study published in 2025 in Frontiers in Neuroscience that found listening to music while performing mindfulness exercises targets neural and cardiac mechanisms in the brain that may treat symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The study also found that both live and virtual music mindfulness sessions reduced stress and altered participants’ state of consciousness, but only live music sessions fostered social connection between listeners.