She is a specialized biologist in evaluating and monitoring marine and coastal ecosystems. Her research interests include the applications of Artificial Intelligence over marine ecosystem conservation, monitoring, and assessment.

She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Lab of Natural and Designed Intelligence. Her thesis is focused on developing neural circuits that link the prefrontal cortex with the striatum. These two brain areas seem implicated in the decision-making process and learning development, so their joining is essential in understanding how these processes work. As a starting point, they have taken task-switching related studies that link experimental data with animal behavior to create a neural circuit capable of representing the triggered neural dynamics as projections of different decisions.

In this framework, they aim to test three different scenarios. One will be considered the healthy condition, and the other two scenarios will represent illness conditions promoted by different dopamine concentrations (high and low levels). Previous works on this topic suggest that high dopamine levels are related to Parkinson’s and low dopamine levels with schizophrenia.

So, in the last year of her thesis work, she will focus on modifying those models to check how these different dopamine concentrations affect the “normal” circuit dynamics