Liberty Hamilton, Ph.D.

Liberty Hamilton, Ph.D., is an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin, jointly appointed by the Department of Neurology and the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

The goal of her lab is to investigate how the human brain processes speech and other natural sounds, and how sound representations change during development and as a result of learning and plasticity. Her research incorporates multisite in vivo electrophysiological recordings in patients with epilepsy with computational modeling analyses to address how low-level features of sounds are transformed into meaningful words and sentences.

Hamilton received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, under Shaowen Bao, where she combined optogenetics and computational models to describe functional interactions within and across layers of the auditory cortex. As an NRSA-funded postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, she worked with Edward Chang to study speech perception using intracranial recordings in adults. She is a co-director of the NeuroComm laboratory within the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at UT Austin.

Hamilton’s translational neuroscience research is performed in a unique clinical setting in collaboration with clinicians at Dell Children’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. Her lab works with patients with epilepsy who experience seizures that cannot be effectively controlled with medication. These patients undergo a surgery in which grids of electrodes are placed on the surface of the brain in order to localize the source of epileptic activity by recording electrical activity directly from the brain surface, a method called electrocorticography. After seizures are localized to a particular brain area, that brain area is resected in a surgery. This type of surgery is highly effective in reducing or eliminating seizure activity. In temporal lobe epilepsy, the areas involved in seizure activity may be near language-related areas, so it is important for clinicians to map out these areas to determine their functioning so that language function is minimally affected.

Hamilton’s research, while separate from this clinical mapping, also provides a window into language function and localization in these patients. During a patient’s stay in the hospital, he or she may volunteer to participate in Hamilton’s research, which involves listening to words, phrases, sentences or stories while brain activity is recorded. Researchers use this to learn how speech is processed in the brain and how this changes depending on the patient’s age. The goal is to provide insight into brain-based treatments for communication disorders including aphasia, delayed language learning and dyslexia.