About
A (very) short educational history
Just as my interests are broad, so too was my formal education. I started at the bench, pipetting and centrifuging in search of new drugs during my Bachelor’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Utrecht University. A course in Psychopharmacology changed everything: I fell in love with neuroscience and went on to pursue a Master’s in Neuroscience & Cognition, also at Utrecht University. From there, I completed a cognitive neuroscience PhD at Leiden University, where I tried to uncover the neuromodulatory underpinnings of why our focus seems so unstable.
Along the way, I have been part of many wonderful lab groups. During my time in Utrecht, I worked with the Infection and Immunity lab of Niels Eijkelkamp and the Iris Sommer lab (then at UMC Utrecht, now at the University of Groningen), and a research visit took me to the Klingberg lab at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. My PhD was embedded in the Temporal Attention lab of Sander Nieuwenhuis at Leiden University. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher in both the Memory and Emotion lab at Radboudumc and Esther Aarts’ food and cognition group at Radboud University.
A (very) short personal history
I was born on the One Happy Island: Aruba. As a child from a Colombian-Cuban mother and an Aruban father, my upbringing was a beautiful mess of Latin-American and Dutch influences. We moved to the Netherlands when I was four, after which I did my primary and secondary school in Nijmegen and my university studies in Utrecht. Now, I still live in Utrecht, where I play football, do climbing, read books and am always looking forward to holidays with lots of hiking!
