Dr. Melissa Caras is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research program seeks to reveal the neural basis for auditory perception, with a specific focus on experience-dependent plasticity.  Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Dr. Caras completed postdoctoral training at New York University’s Center for Neural Science, where she examined the central consequences of developmental hearing loss, and a Ph.D. at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she explored the impact of sex-steroid hormones on auditory processing in wild-caught songbirds.