Biography
Esmeralda Hidalgo-Lopez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center and the Methods, Sex differences, and Development Lab at the University of Michigan. She graduated as a clinical psychologist with a MSc. in Neuroscience at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. During her master’s degree, she investigated exogenous attention mechanisms to emotional distractors through electroencephalography (EEG). She then carried out her doctoral studies at the University of Salzburg under the supervision of Prof. Belinda Pletzer, focusing on ovarian hormones’ effects on brain activation and connectivity along the menstrual cycle. Currently, she studies sex differences in how widespread pain develops in children, using the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset. Although she focuses on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), her interests include a holistic, multi-level approach to neurobehavioral development.