 Why do so many people come away from a musical performance feeling exhilarated, feeling this wonderful sense of performance, and for anyone who's had that experience they know what I'm talking about. This is an interdisciplinary project in which a team of bio-behavioral scientists, social scientists like myself and musicians, we are studying how social networks and music-making operate in a marching band of Arizona State University, and we hope to uncover the bi-directional associations between the social relationships within a marching band, music-making, and the physiological underpinning, specifically hormone levels of cortisol and testosterone. That concept emerged from some early work we did where we looked at moms and babies, and we found that the correlation between cortisol levels for moms and babies was very high, and subsequently we showed that that was true in newlywed couples, so our curiosity led us towards this place of thinking about people who share common social experience. They would have similar levels of these biomarkers. So it seemed like a good opportunity to bring this diverse research agendas together and come up with this interdisciplinary study. There are two hormones that we're looking at in particular, one is cortisol and one is testosterone, and our work has shown that they are very accurately measured in saliva, so the correlation between what's in your saliva, the levels of those hormones in your saliva and what's in your blood is very high, and we can use saliva as a minimally invasive alternative to blood sampling, so testosterone and cortisol are both biomarkers. They reflect the activity of very specific biological systems. We know a tremendous amount about their impact in the body and their effect on cells. Really, if you think about it, there's a long history of work that talks about social support and health and stress, and people believe that having a very extensive social support network is a buffer to stress and would protect you from getting sick. So we're quite interested in how intrinsic individual differences are related to how people respond biologically to context, and now with some of Olga's sophisticated knowledge about social network modeling, we're able to look at that social context in a completely different way. We have two rehearsals, one in the beginning of the season in September and one in the end of the season in November, and during those two rehearsals, students come prior to the rehearsal and they'll provide a saliva sample, and they do an online questionnaire giving us information about their personality as well as their history with marching band and marching band activities, and then at the end of rehearsal, they give us another saliva sample and fill out a questionnaire where they tell us about who their friends are, where they have conflicted relationships, who they go to for performance advice, so now we're able to have this really huge data set that has really so many different ways that we can look at the marching band and the social networks and the performance networks, and then compare those to what's going on in their bodies with using the saliva sample analysis. So there's lots of interesting things to think about in terms of parenting and also in terms of how you coach people, and then I think we're centrally involved in the business world as well and thinking about how people perform in business and in military situations. Well there's so many different avenues of impact, but you know it's hard to speculate about that too much and get excited about it too much because we're really just, this is just the third study, so we have much more to learn. I think as human beings we have a curiosity to understand and ask questions, and research helps us you know provide answers and ask more questions and find out what we don't know and then find things we do know. It's an exciting process and I love being able to be a part of it.