Brian Malone, PhD, is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He specializes in the neurophysiology of the central auditory system, with a focus on the cortical representation of dynamic sounds. Dr. Malone's overall goal is to understand the fundamental neural coding principles that enable robust speech comprehension in challenging listening environments. By pursuing basic research on this issue, Dr. Malone hopes to use the knowledge gained to guide the development of novel therapeutic approaches to communicative disorders, such as algorithms for speech enhancement in hearing aids, and stimulation protocols for neural prosthetic devices for hearing.

His laboratory employs multichannel electrophysiological recordings, computational models, and psychophysical approaches to answer fundamental questions about how auditory cortex processes complex sounds amid competing background noise. Much of his recent research has focused on the encoding of low frequency envelope information because such information is crucial for intelligible speech, and a chief goal for the laboratory is to develop a better general framework for understanding cortical envelope processing.

Dr. Malone has been awarded funding from the National Institutes of Health for his predoctoral (NRSA), postdoctoral (NRSA), and current (R01) research at the John C. and Edward Coleman Memorial Laboratory of the Department.

Specialty:
Sound encoding in the core fields of auditory cortex

Expertise:
Computationally-driven neurophysiological characterization of how features of sounds are encoded and represented in the firing patterns of cortical neurons

Professional Interests:
Developing computational models of auditory receptive fields that capture nonlinear features of the cortical encoding model, and investigating how those features contribute to complex perceptual tasks such as auditory scene segmentation, speech comprehension, and timbral discrimination

Education and Training:
• Doctoral: New York University - Neural Sciences
• Postdoctoral: David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA - Image processing in primary visual cortex