Dr Benavides holds a degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Complutense University of Madrid and is a psychiatry specialist at Complejo Hospitalario de Segovia. She was also a collaborating physician in Mlale, Malawi in 2009.

She was a recipient of an Advanced Training Fellowship from the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation 2013-2015 to work at the Columbia University Medical Center’s Psychiatry Department where she was the Principal Investigator on the project “The Role of Self-esteem in the Psychosis Spectrum: A Comparative Translational Study in Healthy Adolescents, Subjects with High Risk Criteria, and Subjects with Schizophrenia”. COPE (Center of Prevention and Evaluation in Psychosis) team.

During her time at Columbia University Medical Center she performed further studies on neuroimaging in its different facets, participating in a project on the neural networks involved in dopaminergic dysfunction in schizophrenia.

Dr Benavides applied for a short-term fellowship so that over its six-month duration she could analyse a COPE database which included adolescent patients who, although not considered at risk, subsequently developed a psychotic episode: imagines obtained from certain regions of interest in schizophrenia study such as the hippocampus and limbic system would be studied before and after conversion to psychosis to attempt to identify a neuroimaging biomarker of first-episode psychosis in a young population.