Deanna Hanson-Abromeit, PhD, MT-BC is Professor of Music Therapy and Music Education at the University of Kansas (KU). She has been a board-certified music therapist (MT-BC) for twenty-eight years and has worked with a range of populations in community and healthcare settings. As a music therapy educator for nineteen years, Dr. Hanson-Abromeit actively mentors clinical and research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students as future music interventionists and applied researchers. Dr. Hanson-Abromeit leads the Baby-Music Intervention Research (babyMIR) Lab at KU with a focus on developing and strengthening theory, design, research, and practice of music interventions, particularly for infants and families, promoting translational research in a collaborative transdisciplinary framework.
Dr. Hanson-Abromeit developed the Therapeutic Function of Music (TFM) Plan as a tool to deepen our understanding of how and why music contributes to change within therapeutic experiences. The TFM Plan has expanded understanding of music-based intervention development with application to more effective music-based interventions. Dr. Hanson-Abromeit’s current funded research collaborations include music-based interventions that address infant language development, newborn withdrawal from in utero opioid exposure, early childhood emotion regulation development, health disparities during pregnancy, and people living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). She regularly presents at national and international conferences and publishes within a range of journals reaching an international audience. She has been the recipient of various awards, most recently the KU School of Music Outstanding Teaching Award (2023), the AMTA Research and Publication Award (2020) and the KU Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award (2019).
