Maria Perica is currently in her 3rd year in the University of Pittsburgh's Clinical Psychology program. She works in the Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development under the mentorship of Beatriz Luna, using multimodal neuroimaging methodologies to studying the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent cognitive development. Prior to her PhD, Maria got her B.S. in Neural Science from New York University. Her entire family is Croatian, but Maria is the first person in her family to be born in the United States. ​