With a degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Autonomous University of Madrid and a doctorate of Medicine and Surgery from the University of Alcalá (Madrid) that earned a European Doctorate Mention, Dr Parellada received first prize for best doctoral thesis from the Spanish Society of Biological Psychiatry in 2006. She qualified as a psychiatrist from Hospital Doce de Octubre in Madrid and as a university specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry from King’s College London. She has conducted numerous training courses in child psychiatry at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, IoP at Maudsley Hospital, King’s College, London and at Cornell, Oxford and Miami universities. In Spain, Dr Parellada is the director of the AMITEA (integral medical attention for autism spectrum disorders) programme at the child and adolescent psychiatry department of Gregorio Marañón University General Hospital in Madrid.

Her short-term fellowship allowed her to prolong her stay at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she worked mainly with two groups, that of Prof Matthew State Lab and that of Dr Young Shin Kim. Dr Parellada has brought more than 40 patients and their parents for sequencing as part of the collaborations already initiated to engage in international projects for the genetic study of patients with ASD, the Autism Sequencing Consortium (ASC) coordinated by the USA’s National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) and the MIPS Project coordinated by UCSF, something she would not otherwise have been able to do due to lack of funding.

She has also continued to participate in STAR meetings (Service, Training, Advocacy, and Research)) Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders for the diagnosis and treatment of ASDs and to work with Somer Bishop and Vanessa Hus-Ba on the use of the SSC Simons Simplex Collection) database for the study of possible phenotypic clusters with biological validity.