Marcela Ovando-Tellez

I am a speech therapist graduated from the University of Valparaíso in Chile. Motivated by my interest in cognitive rehabilitation, I completed a Master’s degree in Neuroscience at the same university. During my Master’s studies, I began to approach cognitive disorders from a scientific perspective and explored how chronic stress impairs auditory attention and decision-making in a rat model.

After discovering the work conducted in the FrontLab at the Paris Brain Institute (ICM), I moved to Paris to work directly on human cognition research. I participated in an EEG project co-supervised by Pr. Emmanuelle Volle and Dr. Béatrice Garcin (Ovando-Tellez et al., Journal of Neuroscience, 2021). Driven by my growing interest in Cognitive Neuroscience, I then pursued a PhD on the Neuroscience of Creativity under the supervision of Dr. Emmanuelle Volle. 

During my PhD, I investigated how semantic memory supports creative thinking and its neural underpinnings. I showed that individual patterns of functional connectivity predict real-life creative behaviour, and that this link is mediated by the organisation of semantic memory (Ovando-Tellez et al., Science Advances, 2022). I also examined how memory search processes contribute to creativity (Ovando-Tellez et al., Communications Biology, 2022). As a postdoctoral researcher in the same lab, I further explored the mechanisms underlying creative abilities, focusing on the contribution of memory search and the functional connectivity patterns supporting these processes (Ovando-Tellez, Vigreux et al., Imaging Neuroscience, 2025).

In 2023, I moved to Bordeaux for a postdoctoral position with Dr. Michel Thiebaut de Schotten (Ovando-Tellez et al., bioRxiv). There, I explored the functional contribution of white matter to cognition, resulting in a parcellation of white matter based on its functional support using naturalistic data.

After three years of postdoctoral research, I returned to the FrontLab to work with Dr. Alizée Lopez-Persem, where I am now exploring the differentiation between the Default Mode Network (DMN) and the Brain Valuation System (BVS) based on individual patterns of functional connectivity.