Lorna Garcia Penton, PhD

I obtained a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Havana (UH). I later pursued a Master's degree at the Cuban Neuroscience Center (CNC) under the guidance of Prof Mitchell Valdes-Sosa. I completed my PhD at the BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, in collaboration with Prof. Manuel Carreiras, where I investigated the neural mechanisms of bilingualism across lifespans (including children, young adults, and older people).

Subsequently, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC), collaborating with Prof. Adrian Nestor to gain expertise in machine learning techniques applied to fMRI data analysis. In 2020, I joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK, as a Research Associate. I worked alongside Mirjana Bozic to explore the neural mechanisms involved in combinatorial processing across languages.

During the same year, I became a Marie Sklodowska-Curie research fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit (MRC CBU), where I collaborated with Prof. Matt Lambon Ralph. In this role, I investigated language and semantic impairments in people with dementia. Since 2022, I have been clinical research coordinator and project manager at the Cambridge Centre for Frontotemporal Dementia and Related Disorders, working with Prof. James Rowe.

When I'm not working, I love spending time with my husband and kids, doing bootcamp workouts, and going for runs from time to time.