Meet Nadia
Nadia is originally from Mexico. She grew up in the Sonoran desert between Hermosillo, Sonora, and Tucson, Arizona. She studied Psychology at Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) in Guadalajara, Mexico and graduated with honors in December of 2005. Nadia continued her studies at the University of Arizona, where, as a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, she studied the role of the ventral tegmental area in the appearance of anxiety-like behaviors in a rodent model of post-traumatic stress disorder. Nadia joined the BRAIN lab in the summer of 2013. Her research interests include the study of genetic variation in reward circuit function as a moderator of associations between stress, reward processing and related neural activation and the appearance of stress-related psychiatric disorders. In particular, she is interested in focusing on the relationship between reward-related genetic polymorphisms, ventral striatal responses to rewarding stimuli and resilient responses to stress. Outside the lab, Nadia loves watching, attending and playing sports (particularly soccer). She has an interest in everything food related from cooking to dining. She enjoys music and regularly attends concerts and Arts Festivals. She has a devotion to traveling and exploring new cultures.