Raluca Petrican PhD

Dr. Raluca Petrican, Ph.D., is a Lecturer at the Cardiff University. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Science at the University of Toronto. She is particularly interested in the relationship between individual differences in episodic memory (i.e., memory for previously experienced events) and cognitive control processes. Specifically, she seeks to understand how this relationship is reflected in the brain, as well as how it changes across the lifespan and in mood-disordered populations.

Her work has two broad objectives. One is to characterize patterns of change and stability in the brain mechanisms underlying cognitive control and episodic memory across typical lifespan development. Such information can then be used to test whether age-specific versus age-invariant mechanisms relevant to episodic memory and cognitive control make distinguishable contributions to the emergence and maintenance of mood-related problems.

A second objective is to characterize the role of genetic and environmental factors in shaping the relationship between cognitive control and episodic memory processes.