Aaron Marcus-Willers is a mixing engineer working with the Music and Sound Cultures Group under NYU Abu Dhabi’s Pre-Professional Training Program. He graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2022 with a B.A. in Music and a Minor in Chinese Language. Aaron focused on performance and composition as well as music technology and production during his undergraduate studies. His senior capstone project, Live Room, was an immersive recorded performance installation consisting of 30 minutes of original music. The project explored concepts of fragmentation and isolation in the digital landscape of the modern world, drawing influence from virtual performances during the pandemic. Aaron was born and raised in Sonoma, California, a small town just north of San Francisco, and moved to Changzhou, China for a year after high school to study Mandarin Chinese. He has been a guitarist, singer, and songwriter in bands across several genres for the past ten years, and has released 5 albums since 2014, with more music forthcoming. In the coming year, Aaron will be a Research Fellow with NYUAD’s CITIES Center for Interacting Urban Networks, where he will be leading an interdisciplinary research project that focuses on assessing and demonstrating the impacts of large-scale urban development on both human and wildlife populations in the Abu Dhabi islands primarily through acoustic surveys of biophonic and anthrophonic sound.