Einat Liebenthal

Einat Liebenthal, D.Sc. is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Associate Director of the Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics Lab in the Institute for Technology in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital. Her research focuses on understanding verbal and non-verbal communication through digital behavioral measures and multimodal neuroimaging techniques.

• Harvard Medical School - Department of Psychiatry
• McLean Hospital - Functional Neuroimaging & Bioinformatics Lab
• Institute for Technology in Psychiatry

Education:

• BSc in Biology, Hebrew University (1990)
• MSc in Neuroscience, Hebrew University (1993)
• DSc in Neuroscience, Technion Israel Institute for Technology (1997)
• Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Speech Electrophysiology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1997-1999)

Dr. Liebenthal's research centers on cognitive neuroscience approaches to understanding language and emotion processing. Her work investigates the functional organization of the human brain for spoken language perception and the abnormal interactions of language and emotion neurocircuits in psychotic disorders. She has pioneered naturalistic approaches for dynamic assessment of verbal and non-verbal communication in real-world settings, with applications for individuals with language impairments. Her research employs behavioral, multimodal neurobiological, and computational methods to characterize language at multiple levels and identify phenotypes of language malfunction in neurological and mental conditions.

Analysis of Dr. Liebenthal's recent publications reveals a consistent focus on language processing in psychiatric disorders, particularly psychosis. Her work integrates multimodal neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG) with computational linguistics to develop digital phenotyping approaches for mental health assessment. Recent projects include movie-watching fMRI paradigms for language mapping, computational analysis of spoken language in psychosis, and development of the Dynamic Affective Movie Clip Database (DynAMoS) for emotion research. Her methodological contributions to EEG-fMRI integration and naturalistic neuroimaging approaches represent significant advances in the field.

Dr. Liebenthal actively mentors students through research opportunities in her lab, with current projects focusing on naturalistic assessment of language and emotion, and movie-watching fMRI for mapping language and emotion brain networks. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health / National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and the Brain & Behavior Foundation.

She leads the Functional Neuroimaging & Bioinformatics Lab at McLean Hospital's Imaging Center, where her team develops innovative approaches to assess language and emotion functions in individuals with neurological and psychiatric disorders. The lab employs a multidisciplinary approach combining cognitive neuroscience, computational methods, and clinical psychiatry to create scalable, neuroscientifically-grounded diagnostic and interventional methods.