Liberty Hamilton joins the CSD faculty in the Fall of 2017 as an Assistant Professor.  Her research interests include how speech sounds are represented in the auditory cortex and how these representations change during learning, development, and as a result of plasticity. To investigate this, she applies computational methods to intracranial electrophysiological recordings from patients undergoing surgical treatment for epilepsy. This work involves collaborations with clinicians and epileptologists at Austin's Dell Children's Hospital and through the UT Dell Medical School. Dr. Hamilton also teaches Anatomy and Physiology of the Auditory System (CSD 391P/Q). She has co-authored research that has been published in journals including Science, Neuron, The Journal of Neuroscience, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. She has also presented her research at conferences both nationally and internationally.

Dr. Hamilton earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013 in the laboratory of Dr. Shaowen Bao, where she studied sound representation and plasticity in the auditory cortex using multi-unit electrophysiological recordings. This work was funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Edward Chang at the University of California, San Francisco, where she investigated how the human auditory cortex represents speech sounds using intracranial recordings in adult patients with intractable epilepsy. This work was funded by an NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA). She also has previous research experience in non-invasive methods for measuring brain structure and function, including structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).