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Doallo Pesado, Sonia

sonia.doallo@usc.es

Current position

Tenured Professor of Psychobiology at the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology of the University of Santiago de Compostela.

Interests

My main research interest is on the interplay between cognition and emotional and motivational processing. My current research is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the interaction between attention, memory and motivation using event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I am particularly interested in understanding the role of positive and negative reward associations in modulating memory-based biases on perception. In addition, I am investigating the effects of a binge drinking pattern of alcohol consumption on declarative memory and executive functions in non-clinical youth populations. By using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and voxel-based morphometry (VBM), I aim to assess potential structural abnormalities associated to binge drinking that can be linked to neurocognitive functioning.

Brief academic profile

I completed my degree in Psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) in 1998. I obtained my PhD from USC in 2006 supervised by Fernando Cadaveira and Socorro Rodríguez Holguín, through a DPhil scholarship (FPU program) awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. During my PhD, I had a short research stay in the Center for Mind and Brain headed by George R. Mangun at the University of California, Davis. After my PhD, I spent two years (2007-2009) as a postdoctoral fellow in the Brain & Cognition Lab headed by Anna Christina (Kia) Nobre in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, supported by the Spain’s Ministry of Education and Science and the Spanish Science and Technology Foundation (FECYT). In 2010, I returned to the USC as a researcher of the Isidro Parga Pondal Program (Xunta de Galicia). In 2012, I was awarded a three-year Emergent Researcher Grant (funded by the Consellería de Educación e Ordenación Universitaria, Xunta de Galicia) to investigate the neural basis of the interaction between attention, memory and motivation, and which supports collaboration with Kia Nobre at University of Oxford. I am currently Associate Professor of Psychobiology at the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology of the USC. Regarding my teaching activities, I have mainly taught in the Degree of Psychology (subjects: Neuropsychology; Fundamentals of Psychobiology; Behavioural Neuroscience; Cognitive Neuroscience) of the University of Santiago de Compostela and, more recently, in the Interuniversitary Postgraduate Degree in Neuroscience (subject: Behavioural Neuroscience) of the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, Vigo and A Coruña.

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