Aura is pursuing her PhD in Psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Sharon Thompson-Schill. She received her B.S. in Psychobiology and Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2018, and spent two years at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) as a researcher in the Linguistics department– first as a Baggett Fellow, and then as the MEG Lab Manager. Her work is primarily focused on understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying our language and memory systems, and how the two systems interact in real time.
Born & raised in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, Aura spends a significant amount of her time in academia thinking about and working on removing barriers to higher education for marginalized and frontline communities. She also cares about directly addressing the ways in which the current health and climate crises interact with systems that uphold white supremacist and colonial cultures both inside and outside of the academy.
