Maansi Desai

Maansi Desai is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences in the laboratory of Dr. Liberty Hamilton. Maansi also completed her PhD in the Hamilton Lab at The University of Texas at Austin in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences with an emphasis on auditory and computational neuroscience. Much of her work was funded by the Texas Speech and Hearing Foundation. Her dissertation work involved understanding how the brain processes continuous speech while we listen and while we speak using naturalistic multimodal stimuli. Part of this work involves electrophysiological recordings from patients undergoing surgical treatment for epilepsy, in collaboration with neurosurgeons, epileptologists, and neuropsychologists at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, and at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. The lab also uses scalp electroencephalography (EEG) in healthy participants to understand how the brain represents acoustic and linguistic information during speech production and perception in natural environments. She has co-authored research that has been published in journals including but not limited to Nature Neuroscience, Nature Human Behavior, and The Journal of Neuroscience. She has also presented her research at conferences both nationally and internationally. Her research interests include auditory attention and utilizing electrophysiological modalities to advance the field of brain-computer interfaces or wearables to help improve various forms of communication impairments.