Lucia Hernandez-Peña

BSc (Autonomous University of Madrid), MSc (Complutense University of Madrid), PhD (RWTH Aachen University)

College roles

Special Supervisor in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences

University roles

Research Associate, Department of Psychology

Biography

Dr Lucia Hernandez Pena is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, working in Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group. 

Lucia received her BSc in Psychology from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), followed by an MSc in Mental Health and Neuroscience at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). She completed her PhD through a graduate school programme run jointly by RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and the University of Pennsylvania (USA). Her PhD research focused on social neuroscience, examining real-time social interactions between siblings and the neural correlates of empathy, perspective-taking, reward processing and developmental risk trajectories during adolescence.

She is currently working on a new longitudinal project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigating microstructure brain development and its relation to cognition and mental health in typically developing and neurodiverse (22q11.2 deletion syndrome) adolescents.