The brain is a complex and mysterious organ, but its cognitive processes will be a little less mysterious if Belén Guerra-Carrillo has her way. Guerra-Carrillo, who graduated from Baruch in 2010 with a BA in psychology, recently began a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley, in cognitive neuroscience, the branch of neuroscience that studies the biological foundations of mental phenomena. Her studies there are supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.
The NSF fellowship, which fosters graduate study in the sciences, is the most prestigious award a graduate in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines can receive. The three-year fellowships provide up to $121,500 of support to exceptional students who have proposed graduate-level research projects in their field.
Guerra-Carrillo gives credit to Jennifer Mangels, a professor in the Department of Psychology and principal investigator at the Mangels Dynamic Learning Lab at Baruch College, for urging her to pursue the fellowship as well as fostering her initial interest in the field. Explains Guerra-Carrillo, who moved to New York City to live with her brother after graduating from high school in Ecuador, “I was not always a psychology major; I started off studying marketing because it comprised many of my interests. However, I soon realized that I was motivated to understand the seemingly effortless processes that we do daily, like learning or even just keeping many thoughts in mind at the same time. After taking Dr. Mangels’s class on Mind, Brain, and Behavior, I also became excited to learn what our brain can tell us about these processes.”
Given Guerra-Carrillo’s interest in the puzzles of the mind, it should be no surprise that she minored in mathematics, a discipline she refers to as “fun, because math problems feel like puzzles.” She also found that math aided in her understanding of the neuroimaging and statistical methods she was using in her psychology research labs and also helped her understand computer programming better. She notes that the latter benefit is important for any psychology student: “Having some programming knowledge not only makes you more competitive for jobs or graduate programs, but it also facilitates your work tremendously by making the computer do most of the tedious work.”
Guerra-Carrillo’s passion for cognitive neuroscience grew out of her undergraduate course and lab work, her teaching experiences (she was a tutor in an afterschool program and at Baruch’s Student Academic Consulting Center), and her position as manager in Dr. Mangels’s lab, where she was hired immediately after graduation. In the lab, she refined her research interests while working on projects that examined motivational factors that influence learning and selective attention. (One of the projects involved measuring brain activity and the other involved work with children.) Guerra-Carrillo was also encouraged to develop her own study, which examined how individuals use information that they obtain from somebody else to make a decision. As she begins her doctoral program in fall 2012, she plans to study the malleability of many cognitive processes that have traditionally been thought to be fixed and how training these processes could impact academic achievement.
Guerra-Carrillo is enthusiastic about the practical applications of cognitive neuroscience. “I became fascinated with how research in this field can directly inform education,” she says, adding that, while she is still deciding exactly what she will be doing after graduate school, “I know that I will be involved in research. I just hope that one day my research will influence and help improve educational practices.”
—Sally Fay