Nicolas is currently a Dean’s Graduate Fellow and first-year graduate student in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Duke University. He works under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Gaffrey at the Duke Early Experiences and the Developing Brain Lab. Nicolas’s research focuses on studying the development of mood disorders in children using multimodal techniques (e.g. self- and child-report, task-based, and fMRI measures). Specifically, he is interested in studying how the mechanisms of emotion regulation and reward processing relate to the early onset of depression, the neural correlates that are implicated by these processes, and the heterogeneous nature of mood disorders.
Nicolas and his family immigrated to the US from Colombia when he was just 2 years old. He is proud to be the first person in his family to earn an undergraduate degree and pursue graduate studies. He hopes to use the experiences he has had as a first-gen, Latino student who has benefited from wonderful mentors to inform his mentorship style and provide his mentees with a welcoming, nurturing, and enriching experience.