Introducing New Graduate Student Anna Benedict

August 12, 2024 - Shelly DeJong

Anna-Benedict.jpg Meet Anna Benedict, an incoming graduate student in the Clinical Science research area.

Name: Anna Benedict (she/her) 

Hometown Rancho Palos Verdes, CA 

Education:

B.S., University of Notre Dame '21, cum laude 

Double major in Neuroscience & Behavior and English, with Honors Concentration in Creative Writing 

 

Tell us about your background/experience. 

After graduation, I worked for three years as a CRC on the Neurobehavioral Research Team at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, studying sound perception, language processing, and their neural correlates (via fNIRS, EEG, multimodal fNIRS-EEG, and MRI) in people with Fragile X Syndrome. I'm also the founder/leader of the Our Stories Project, a memoir-writing partnership between university students and members of Clubhouses, support communities for folks with serious mental illness. From this project, I have led 2 large member-student teams through the project so far and have edited and published two books! (Proceeds support the Clubhouse featured in it. The most recent book can be found here! :) 

 

Why grad school? 

I'm excited to continue pursuing my interests in psychology and about the direction over my own work that being an academic can provide! I'm also excited by the doors a PhD in this field can open - research, clinical practice, teaching, academic leadership, and more. Lastly, I am an avid learner, and after a few years in the corporate world, I'm eager to get back into the classroom. 

 

What do you hope to research while you're here? 

Working primarily with Dr. Katy Thakkar and also with Dr. Raffles Cowan, I aim to do research with folks with psychotic disorders, especially schizophrenia, and folks along the schizotypy/psychosis spectrum. Currently I'm interested in studying some combination of resilience, creativity, language, and narrative identity in this population, potentially integrating neuroimaging methods. 

 

What do you love about Clinical Science? Or why are you interested in it? 

I have been fascinated by the human mind since I was young, and I love Clinical Science's potential to use cutting-edge research to help people across the full spectrum of neurodivergence and neurotypicality. I believe it's essential for research to be informed by clinical care (and vice versa), and for both to be informed by their actual stakeholders - an advocacy-driven perspective I'm excited to explore at MSU through Mental Health Research Connect. 

 

In your free time, what do you like to do? 

A whole smorgasboard! I love to read, write creatively (fiction, essay, poetry, and everything in between), run (I did 2 half-marathons this spring!), hike, kickbox, thrift, go to museums, get up to general arts & crafts shenanigans, and hang with my partner and my cat Baba Yaga.