Anna Benedict

Anna graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021, where she double-majored in Neuroscience & Behavior and English, with an honors concentration in Creative Writing. After graduation, she worked as a CRC for 3 years on the Neurobehavioral Research Team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, studying developmental trajectories of Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), assessing the full spectrum of genes to brain function to behavior and focusing on the behavioral, sensory, and neural correlates of sound and language development in young children with FXS using multimodal fNIRS-EEG. She is the founder of the Our Stories Project, a memoir co-writing initiative between university students and members of Clubhouses (psychosocial rehabilitation centers for adults with serious mental illness). The project is dedicated to empowerment, allyship, and advocacy, and through it she has led, taught, and/or mentored over 120 students and community members and published two books of own-voices narratives and artwork. She is co-mentored by Dr. Katy Thakkar in CNL and by Dr. H. Raffles Cowan in the Risk, Resilience, and Recovery Lab. Anna is interested in studying mechanisms of resilience, narrative identity, self-perception, creativity, and language in individuals with psychotic disorders and across the schizotypy spectrum. In her free time, she writes creatively (fiction, poetry, literary essay), reads, crafts, stays active, and spends time outdoors with good company.