Liberty Hamilton

I study how the human brain processes speech and other natural sounds. I am currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and the Department of Neurology at Dell Medical School. I am also an affiliate of the Institute for Neuroscience, the Center for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, and the Clinically Applied Rehabilitation Research and Engineering group at UT Austin. You can find my lab website here, where information is probably more up to date.

I did my postdoc in Dr. Edward Chang's lab at the Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, where I studied speech representation in the human auditory cortex. I did my PhD in Dr. Shaowen Bao's laboratory (now at U. of Arizona) at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, where I used optogenetics and computational models to describe how sound is processed by neural circuits in the auditory cortex.

Before beginning my PhD, I worked under Dr. Katherine Narr at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, formerly at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying structural and functional deficits in the brain related to schizophrenia and other neurological disorders using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).

Even before that, I graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California with my bachelor's degree in neuroscience (cellular/molecular track), and additional concentrations in music (piano performance) and Spanish.