Nicole Melrose is an international clinician, speaker, and the Education Outreach Coordinator for D’Addario Orchestral, and the founder of StringRise, a nationally recognized organization focused on transforming music education through neuroscience-informed, trauma-aware, and motivation-centered pedagogy. Her work is deeply shaped by her own story. Nicole grew up in a low-income, first-generation Arab-American household marked by instability and trauma. Her early life was defined less by long-term planning and more by survival. At age eleven, a public school string teacher placed a violin in her hands, a moment that would ultimately change the trajectory of her life. While she could not have known it at the time, that experience became the beginning of a lifelong exploration into how sound, structure, and human connection shape the brain and nervous system. Through learning physical setup, bow control, and sound production, Nicole experienced something new: focus, agency, and internal stability. Music did not simply become an artistic outlet, it became a regulatory and identity-forming force.
By the age of fifteen, she knew she wanted to build programs for students like herself.
In 2013, Nicole walked into a Dallas ISD school and built a string program from the ground up, beginning by crowdfunding twelve violins for twelve students. What started as a grassroots effort quickly grew into a nationally recognized program. Through this work, including the founding of the Ubuntu Music Project, Nicole began noticing a powerful and consistent pattern: the most significant student transformations were not driven by talent or resources alone, but by how students were being taught, how their nervous systems were being engaged, and how sound and structure were being used to create safety, motivation, and agency. This led her to deeply study the intersections of learning science, neurobiology, trauma, motivation, and pedagogy, developing a methodology that treats music education not simply as skill acquisition, but as nervous-system-informed human development.
Out of this work, StringRise was born. Today, Nicole’s work has served thousands of students, educators, and organizations across the United States and internationally through keynotes, district-wide professional development, consulting, and large-scale program design.