Dr. Lucia Navarro de Lara finished her first master’s studies in telecommunications engineering, in her hometown Valencia, Spain and worked in industry in Vienna, Austria. While working part-time and being mother of two children, she pursued a master’s in biomedical engineering at the TU Wien in Austria. Then, after almost 13-year industrial occupation at Siemens, she left industry and started as a PhD student and research assistant in 2012, at the Medical University of Vienna. After her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow for Dr. Aapo Nummenmaa at the Martinos center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical school for his project integrating a whole head radio frequency (RF) coil array with the first whole head multichannel transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) array system, with the help of her experience in multimodal hardware.
Dr. Navarro de Lara is now an instructor of radiology at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and her research is focused on elucidating the mechanisms of network-level brain responses to non-invasive brain stimulation methods. Based on the development of the “RF-electroencephalogram (EEG) Cap”, the first-of-its-kind wearable RF head coil and the related signal processing tools, she envisions a complete solution for concurrent TMS/functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)/EEG methodologies. This triple combination can be seen as a versatile neuroscience tool, which will have the potential to perform non-invasive high-resolution causal mapping of the human brain.