Ana Belén Calvo Calvo

Dr Calvo holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Salamanca, a doctorate in Psychology from the Complutense University of Madrid and a master’s in Research Methodology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

She trained as a researcher at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Service of the Gregorio Marañon Health Research Institute (IiSGM) at Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, with a predoctoral fellowship obtained on a competitive basis. She furthered her clinical and research training at the Orygen Youth Health Clinical and Research Centre, University of Melbourne (Australia), working with a leading team in early intervention and investigation for young people with serious mental disorders. Her principal study focus is the efficacy of early psychotherapeutic interventions and in this area she defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Study of the Efficacy of Parallel Group Psychotherapy for Adolescents with Early Onset Psychosis and their Families “ and has published various journal articles with a high impact factor.

On a clinical level, she has collaborated as a therapist in PIENSA (Adolescent Psychosis Intervention Programme) and been a member of the therapeutic team of the ATRAPA (Actions for Personality Treatment in Adolescence) programme at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Service of Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón in Madrid.

She is a director and professor of the General Health Psychology Master’s and a professor of the Master’s in Neuropsychology and Education at the International University of La Rioja , as well as a professor of the Research Designs subject in the Master’s in Health Psychology at the Pontificia de Comillas University, Madrid.

The short-term fellowship she was awarded by the Alicia Koplowitz Foundation allowed her to perform six months of research at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), Beaumont Hospital Dublin and Trinity College, Dublin. During that time she collaborated with the Psychiatric Epidemiology Research across the Lifespan (PERL) group led by Professor Mary Cannon, which is particularly interested in the discovery of first-risk indicators of mental disorders in adolescents and young adults. This allowed her to do further work in the study at the epidemiological, neurocognitive and neuroimaging level of adolescents with psychotic symptomatology, after which she will publish various scientific articles and give a talk at the Society for International Schizophrenia Research Conference in Florence in March 2016.