Stella completed a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Spanish at Gettysburg College (Pennsylvania, United States) in 2019. Alongside her undergraduate studies, she worked as a research assistant in the Personality and Psychopathology Lab at Gettysburg College, where she collaborated on a project investigating the dysfunctional reward mechanisms that may underlie self-injurious behaviors in borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Motivated to deepen her understanding of this high-risk disorder, she moved to Barcelona to pursue a Master of Science in Research in Behavior and Cognition at the University of Barcelona. Under the supervision of Dr. Josep Marco-Pallarés (Learning from Reward Lab) and Dr. Daniel Vega Moreno (Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, Hospital of Igualada), her Master’s thesis focused on mapping the brain correlates of BPD. After earning her master’s degree in 2020, she worked for a year with Dr. Vega Moreno at the Hospital of Igualada, where she combined clinical and research work while seeking funding for her doctoral studies at the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit (now BraCo).
In 2021, she was awarded the INPhINIT Retaining Doctoral Fellowship from the “la Caixa” Foundation and began her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Marco-Pallarés and Dr. Vega Moreno. Her thesis investigated the neural correlates of social reward in healthy participants and young adults diagnosed with BPD. Specifically, she developed a novel, ecologically valid paradigm using stimuli adapted from social media (e.g., “Likes” from Instagram) and employed brain imaging techniques such as EEG and fMRI to identify alterations in the neural processing of social reward in BPD.
Stella defended her thesis this October as part of the Doctoral Programme in Biomedicine at the University of Barcelona.
The neural correlates of social reward in borderline personality disorder
Doctoral Programme in Biomedicine.
Supervisor: Josep Marco Pallarés and Daniel Vega Moreno
The thesis will be defended in:
Facultat de Psicologia – Universitat de Barcelona
Campus Mundet
Pg.Vall d’Hebron 171
Edifici de Ponent