Aaron Williamon is Professor of Performance Science at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where he directs the Centre for Performance Science (CPS), a partnership of the RCM and Imperial College London. Aaron joined the RCM as Research Fellow in 2000 and was appointed Senior Research Fellow in 2004 and Professor of Performance Science in 2010. His research focuses on skilled performance and applied scientific initiatives that inform music learning and teaching, as well as the impact of music and the arts on society.
Aaron established the RCM Centre for Performance Science in 2000. As the first centre of its kind in a conservatoire, the CPS has remained alert to the mission and purpose of conservatoire training and to the demands of the music profession. In 2015, the CPS was awarded Centre of Excellence status at Imperial College London. The RCM–Imperial Centre for Performance Science captures, investigates, inspires, and disrupts ways of thinking about performance practice that cut across a wide array of domains. It does this through dynamic partnerships with the renowned centres of art, design, science, and technology clustered around London’s Exhibition Road.
Aaron is the founder of the International Symposium on Performance Science, founding chief editor of Performance Science (a Frontiers journal), and the founding chair of Healthy Conservatoires, an international network constituted in 2015 to support health and wellbeing among student and professional performing artists. Aaron is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and the UK’s higher education academy, AdvanceHE (FHEA), and in 2008, he was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Music (HonRCM).