Liberty Hamilton and Alex Huth, both Berkeley Neuroscience PhD alums, returned to UC Berkeley this past summer as assistant professors of neuroscience and statistics, after being faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin. They are both also HWNI members, and are a married couple.
In their labs, Hamilton and Huth both study how the brain processes language. Hamilton primarily works with patients with epilepsy who have electrodes implanted in their brains before surgery to map out their speech areas, and focuses on how the brain turns sound into meaning as it develops from an early age through young adulthood. Huth uses data from people listening to stories to build computational models of how different parts of the brain understand language, and then decodes language information such as words from brain activity.
In a Q&A from the College of Letters & Science, Hamilton and Huth discuss their return to Berkeley, the potential clinical and ethical implications of their research, and more. Read the Q&A with Hamilton and Huth.
