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Lucía Vaquero

Lucía Vaquero

Visiting Scholar

Music and Audio Research Laboratory

Lucía Vaquero is a visiting scholar at NYU, associated to FAS-Psychology, CLaME and MARL. She works at the intersection between her three passions: neuroscience, music and her motivation for helping others. From the beginning of her career, she has been involved and has led a number of collaborations, simultaneously working on music-neuroscience related projects and on studies focused on other topics (i.e., brain effects of oncological treatments, or neural bases of addiction). Dr. Vaquero acts as a senior researcher at the Center for Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (Madrid, Spain) where she has started her own research line focused on ‘Neuroscience & Music’, exploring the beneficial effects –at brain, cognitive, and emotional levels– of musical experience and interventions throughout humans' lifetime. She has been recently awarded with an EU-funded fellowship from the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions program to carry out her project ‘Social Media Artistic tRaining in Teenagers (SMART)’, which will allow her to develop her work for a bit over 3 years starting in May 2023 in different collaborating centers: New York University (USA), Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), the Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Germany), and the private company Salumedia Labs (Spain). Dr. Vaquero’s expertise resides in the study of brain plasticity phenomena associated with musical experience using mainly neuropsychological and structural neuroimaging methods. In her numerous collaborative projects, she has applied different multi-methodological approaches, and she continues to expand her knowledge in order to extract the best, most complete conclusions from diverse sources of information (cognitive, behavioural, mental health markers, neurophysiological data, brain structural information, etc.).