Claudia García de la Cadena

Background

My entry into psychology was not by chance. I had grown up with parents deeply committed to both formal and informal education. My father used to tell us that the most valuable thing a human being had was their intelligence, their thinking and their constant desire to learn. I remember that every moment was an opportunity to marvel at a painting, a landscape, a kind of tree or a sunrise, and to always discover different things.

I am the second of five siblings. As a child I had pneumonia and my mother was always overprotective. I even have to say that when my father saw me learning to swim and spending the whole class crying, he took me out of the class and, I remember, told me: “I will not let you hate and fear water.” So I stopped attending swimming lessons when I was little, and later I learned with my father’s help and my own willpower; now it is an activity I greatly enjoy.

My drive to know and understand how the brain worked made me decide to become a psychologist, but what I always wanted to become was a neuropsychologist. That is why I joined the School of Psychology of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and from the very first day I was always interested in doing research. I began attending a Sleep Laboratory at the National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery MVS, and later I had the good fortune of being accepted into the Neuropsychology Laboratory of the UNAM, directed by Dr Feggy Ostrosky, where I began to learn what I loved most. I finished my degree with topics related to Parkinson’s disease and neuropsychological and psychophysiological assessments, and later I entered the Master’s in Psychobiology, which had Neuropsychology as one of its areas, and I carried out work on normal and pathological ageing. During this time I also joined the National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery to help set up the Experimental Psychology Laboratory, where I worked with Dr Elisa Alonso in the genetics department, and in the area of Psychoeducation through the creation of support groups for different illnesses which, even in my absence and thanks to the perseverance of the colleagues who stayed, continue to operate, providing services to patients with neurological illnesses and their families.

In 1999 I decided, as part of a personal life project, to start a family and settle in Guatemala City, where my two daughters were born—Paula and Diana, the treasure I most cherish in this world. Once I had completed the requirements to practise in the country, I began to work at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. When I arrived in Guatemala, my husband Mynor told me: “The only place where you can do research in this country is in the police force and at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG).” I have worked at the UVG since May 2002. From the beginning I came to the university to set up a research unit, invited by the then director, Dr María del Pilar Gracioso, but I carried out many tasks: I was coordinator of the Psychology degree programme, I supported administrative tasks in the Master’s in Psychological Counselling and Mental Health, then I was director of the Department of Psychology and a lecturer. Finally, in 2015 I began, together with Dr Tedd Judd, as director of the Master’s in Clinical Neuropsychology, and now we direct the Graduate Program and Master’s in Applied Neuropsychology and the graduate programme in Psychological Interventions and Health.

Thanks to the institutional support of the UVG, of my dean Dr Cristina Zilbermann de Luján and my colleagues in the department, as well as of my husband Dr Mynor Villeda, I was able to fulfil my dream of earning a Doctorate in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Universidad de La Laguna, Spain, under the supervision of Dr Juan E. Jiménez.

Since joining the UVG, I have carried out teaching and research work in different disciplines and with different research groups, alongside colleagues in Spain, the United States, Mexico and Latin America. I am convinced that unity and joint work make us stronger, and that the development of Psychology and Neuropsychology in Guatemala will benefit from the joint work of all of us who make up the profession.