The Bronze Medalist of the World Piano Competition in 2015, Dr. Mei Rui was praised by the Boston Globe as a “riveting” virtuoso, by the Cincinnati Enquirer as a “brilliant pianist with a satiny touch,” and by Boston Musical Intelligencer as an artist with “deeply felt and intense musicality.” New York Classical Review writes of her Grammy-nominated recording “Three by Three” by Eric Nathan (Albany Records): “Rui was amazing at what seemed to be impossible; an excellent pianist with extreme virtuosity.” A native of Shanghai, Mei began her piano studies at the age of 3, and gave her first solo recital at the age of 10 in front the President of Austria at the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna. At age 11, she made her orchestral debut soloing with the Beijing Radio Symphony. She has performed to critical acclaim in the United States and abroad, including a recent performance of Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.3 with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Rachmaninoff Concerto No.2 with the TMC Orchestra at Hobby Center, a season-opening recital at the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, recital with Roger Tapping at Rice, and recitals in Jordan Hall, Boston. Upcoming concerts include a chamber recital with Houston Symphony musicians Eric Halen and Bill Vermeulen in May 2019, chamber concerts with ROCO, and a performance of Rachmaninoff Concerto No.1 with the World Doctors Orchestra at Hobby Center in August 2019.

Equally active as a chamber musician, Rui has appeared at Ravinia Festival, Yellowbarn, PMP, Taos, and Music Academy of the West. She was invited to teach in the Young Artist Program and was artist-in-residence at Yellowbarn. An active chamber musician, she has collaborated members of the Juilliard Quartet, Issac Perlman, Bill Vermeulen, Roger Tapping, and Peter Frankl. A dedicated educator, she maintains a full studio of award-winning piano students, many of whom have performed in Carnegie Hall as top prize winners in national and international competitions and been accepted into Manhattan School of Music, Mannes, Shepherd School of Music, and Yale School of Music. Starting in 2016 she was a clinical research scientist at MD Anderson Cancer Center, where she conducted music-in-medicine research and led a live-music intervention clinical study involving 400 cancer patients, health care providers and volunteers to investigate the role of defined musical intervention on stress using proteomic analysis, fMRI and EKG. Last year her scientific research titled “Enhancing Surgical Performance by Adopting Expert Musicians’ Practice and Performance Strategies” was published in the journal “Surgery.” She is currently a research scientist at Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine program.

A graduate of Yale University and Yale School of Music, she holds duo-degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (B.A.) and Music (M.M., A.D. D.M.A), with a doctoral dissertation titled “Beethoven’s Reinvention of the Contrapuntal Art in the “Hammerklavier” Sonata.” At Yale, she was the recipient of the Sheffield Scientific Scholar for the Excellence in Sciences, Bruce Simonds Fellowship, George Miles Fellowship, and Joseph Seldon Memorial Award for the Excellence in the Arts.