Karen Chan Barrett, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Institute for Health & Aging at the UCSF School of Nursing and the Department of Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery at the School of Medicine. She is an Auditory Cognitive Neuroscientist, and her research interests include the neuroscience of artistic creativity, music perception in cochlear implant users, and music, aging, and health.

Dr. Barrett has also taught as collegiate faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, co-teaching a Music and the Brain class with Dr. Indre Viskontas (2019-2022). Before moving to San Francisco in the Spring of 2016, Dr. Barrett served as adjunct faculty at Peabody Institute of Music and Johns Hopkins University, teaching introductory music cognition seminars to graduate and undergraduate students. Dr. Barrett received her Ph.D. in Music Theory and Cognition from Northwestern University in March 2015. Dr. Barrett's graduate work used perceptual and neural experiments (EEG) to study attention to complex multivoiced music as well as the impact of musical training on neural plasticity.