Q – Juan, what do you like about research?

I find research as a way of living because it’s a really fulfilling and exciting experience. At the beginning of every day at the lab, I always find myself glad to have the opportunity to learn something new in order to accomplish a new task or write down a project. There’s always something new to learn, like a tool, fact or technique awaiting to be discovered in a different book or paper. Also meeting new people that are interested in this area makes me feel like science in general and, of course, cognitive neuroscience is a worldwide language shared by many others with different perspectives and approaches to a problem, and those ideas are worth sharing, therefore I decided to work as a medical researcher because I think that helping others is an objective that goes beyond the clinical practice.

Q – Why are you interested in our lab?

Previously I have done some projects on neurophysiology, but I want to gain some hands-on experience with TMS and its potential applications in neurological diseases such as dementia or cerebrovascular diseases in order to share this knowledge with my team back in Colombia.  Also, I have already been part of interdisciplinary teams in other contexts, and I think that the different perspectives available at the speech and hearing neuroscience laboratory are enriching for my training as a medical researcher because I want to learn from all the different perspectives on the lab and their wide experience in topics of interest such as speech-language pathology and biomedical engineering.

Juan, we welcome you to the lab and to Canada!