Ana Cubillo Fernandez
Co-Lead Learning Minds, Jacobs Foundation
Before joining the Jacobs Foundation as a Co-Lead for the Learning Minds portfolio, Ana was an active researcher in the field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Trained as a Clinical Psychologist in Spain, she gained the Alicia Koplowitz Fellowship to further specialize in Child Psychology and Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, King’s College London, where she also earned a PhD in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She next took up the challenge of shifting her research field to expand her scientific knowledge and methodological approaches on Neuroeconomics and Human Development at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics, Department of Economics/Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, at the University of Zurich, as well as at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department, University Psychiatric Clinic in Basel.
Her research has focused on the identification of individual differences in the development of the self-regulation and cognitive skills needed to succeed in school, which can in turn help identify individual students' strengths and weaknesses in cognitive development. These results can in turn inform the development of individualized interventions such that all students reach their maximal potential. Using a combination of brain imaging and computational methods, her most recent work has shown that it is possible to identify individual differences arising after cognitive training in children and predict their future academic and socioemotional skills using simple performance measures from cognitive tasks. Thus, the type of measures used and the timing of assessments are critical in determining the mechanism of action of the training.