Noelia finished her degree in Biology in 2009 at the University of Valencia. Her early research experience involved brain plasticity and development in murine models. After graduating, she was awarded a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation to undertake an MSc Neurosciences at Oxford University where she became interested in cognitive neuroscience. Given her prior interest in brain plasticity, her passion for music and especially guided by the fact that music training induces important neuroplastic changes, in September 2012 she started a PhD in the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit in Barcelona, which had an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Robert Zatorre, an internationally renowned researcher and the pioneer of the field of music neuroscience. The results obtained during her PhD have had a great impact in the research community. Her project identified the functional and structural neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia. Persons with music-specific anhedonia do not derive pleasure from music while they can perceive music normally (i.e. are not amusic) and show an intact reward response to other types of rewarding stimuli (such as money). For her postdoc, she will work on a project involving music-based interventions for neurological rehabilitation of TBI and aphasic patients with Dr. Teppo Särkämö from Helsinki University.
Noelia will receive her PhD this September in the Doctoral program in Research in Personality and Behaviour under the supervision of Dr. Josep Marco-Pallarés.
Structural and functional interaction in music and monetary reward processing
Doctoral program in Research in Personality and Behaviour.
Thesis supervisors: Josep Marco-Pallarés.
The thesis will be defended in:
Facultat de Psicologia – Universitat de Barcelona
Campus Mundet
Pg.Vall d’Hebron 171
Edifici de Ponent
September 21st, 2017
Sala de Graus