Looking for an exciting opportunity in research, data science, project management, etc. With more than 10 years of international experience, I bring expertise in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and data science, along with strong skills in , statistics, web development, open science, project management and mentorship. I'm eager to contribute analytical and problem-solving skills to empirically grounded projects.
After completing a research master's, I became a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in Psychology at Lancaster University. In my thesis, I investigated how conceptual processing—that is, the comprehension of the meaning of words—is supported by linguistic and sensorimotor brain systems, and how research on this topic is influenced by methodological aspects such as the operationalisation of variables and the sample size of experiments.
Next, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. I worked at the Department of Language and Culture, and specifically within the PoLaR Lab and C-LaBL. As the local manager of the LESS Project (Language Economy through Transfer Source Selectivity), I worked on a longitudinal study that investigates how bilingual people acquire an additional language, how this process is influenced by the characteristics of the languages, and how the process is instantiated in the brain. As part of this work, I contributed to designing our main study and developing materials in Norwegian and English, as well as creating materials in Spanish and English for a partner study in Spain. After documenting and pretesting these materials, I prepared a preregistration for the studies. Additionally, I recruited participants, designed the protocol for electroencephalography (EEG) sessions, and trained students and research assistants in both the protocol and EEG methodology more broadly. I also established and managed an EEG lab, conducted numerous sessions, supervised those led by research assistants, and monitored participants’ longitudinal progress. Moreover, I presented the study design at conferences and collaborated with research assistants to preprocess, visualise and analyse EEG and behavioural data.
I am also interested in the relationships between language and other cognitive domains, as well as in the origins and evolution of language.
I employ a range of tools, including behavioural and electroencephalographic experiments, corpus analysis, statistics and programming. The materials, data and analyses used in my research are available at https://osf.io/25u3x.
Finally, an AI chat based on my portfolio and interests is available here.
Recent work
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Postdoctoral fellow, Nov 2022 – 14 Feb 2025
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
- Additional service: co-organisation of multiple events, including the lunch meetings of AcqVA Aurora and C-LaBL, and a public outreach event of C-LaBL. Peer-review for Cognition, Cognitive Science and EuroSLA Conference.
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Education
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Research Master Language and Communication, 2013–2017
Tilburg University and Radboud University (the Netherlands)
- Grade: 7.54 out of 10 (Distinction)
- In my thesis, conducted at Tilburg University and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, I investigated how the comprehension of words during reading is modulated by modality-specific (i.e., visual, auditory and haptic) information in words. Consistent with a large body of research, I observed that conceptual processing is not restricted to abstract linguistic representations, but is modulated by the perceptual information in words and by people's individual experiences in perceptual domains. Outside of my thesis, I investigated the influence of specific languages in nonverbal cognition. Specifically, I reviewed research examining how and why people's perception of motion may be modulated by the way in which their first language encodes motion events in sentences. Furthermore, I investigated the co-evolution of language and other cognitive systems. Throughout this research, I used a range of multidisciplinary methods including word classification surveys, corpus analysis and electroencephalography.
- Student member, Master’s curriculum and accreditation committee
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BA English, 2007–2013
Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain)
- One-year Erasmus exchange at University of Jyväskylä, Finland
- One-year exchange at University of Barcelona, Spain
- Six-month Spanish teaching placement in Kaunas, Lithuania
- Grade: 7.30 out of 10 (2:1 Hons)
Further courses
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Neurobiology of language, 2017
Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics
- Course focussed on multilingualism, including the interesting and hotly-debated topic of cognitive benefits.
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Big data in society, 2016
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- I honed my experience in R and learned about techniques such as topic modelling and crowdsourcing.
- Coursework
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Linear mixed-effects models in R, 2016
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
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Transcranial brain stimulation, 2015
Donders Institute, Radboud University
- I gained theoretical and practical experience in the technique of transcranial brain stimulation. This technique occupies a privileged position in the area of conceptual processing (i.e., the comprehension of words in the brain), as it allows tapping into the causality of experimental effects with a greater precision than most other techniques.
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Neurobiology of language, 2015
Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics
- I learned about the functional mapping of language in the brain, and the toolkit used for this research.
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Psycholinguistics: Self-monitoring, 2015
Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics
- I learned about how speech errors can serve as a window into the psychology of language.
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Part of Neuroimaging 1, 2014
Radboud University
- I followed the first two months of this course as a listener to learn the principles of electroencephalography, event-related potentials, magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging.
