Marina Rodriguez Lopez

Marina Rodriguez Lopez is a PhD student in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Amy Milton. Her doctoral research investigates how stress, including early life stress, influences the development and maintenance of compulsive behaviours, using rodent models with translational relevance to obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and related mental health conditions.

Prior to her PhD, Marina completed a First-Class BA (Hons) in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and an MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She then worked as a Research Assistant in Professor Dominik Bach’s lab (UCL), where she developed a virtual reality paradigm to study the learning and extinction of avoidance behaviours.

Her broader academic interests include stress and resilience, animal models of mental health, and the neural and behavioural mechanisms underlying compulsivity.