Annabelle Soto

Annabelle Soto graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University with a B.S. in Integrative Neuroscience with a Cognitive Neuroscience concentration and minors in Spanish and Visual Arts. As a Latina woman, she is passionate about culturally-responsive and evidence-based clinical research and service, and is excited to work on a team that provides such important work decreasing access barriers and improving care and education for children with autism, their families, and the local community.

Annabelle has over 5+ years of experience in culturally-responsive research on the brain and behavior. At Fordham University, she combined her interests in language, cognition, and the arts towards her senior thesis on the mediating factors between bilingualism and creativity—published in the peer-reviewed Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal (FURJ; Soto & Grey, 2022). Through a research assistantship at Fordham and a service-based outreach project for environmental and social justice, she traveled to Puerto Rico to recruit and provide community service for environmental organization members, and was inspired to pursue more work that prioritizes community engagement and the inclusion of under-served groups. At Dr. Monica Rivera Mindt’s community-engaged neurocognitive research lab at Mount Sinai and Fordham University, she worked on federally-funded studies that aim to increase access to and understanding of brain health research. For these studies, she enjoyed administering comprehensive neuropsychological batteries in Spanish and English. She has led local and national teams for culturally responsive translations of study materials from English to Spanish, and managed teams to ensure the successful launch of Spanish procedures.

Annabelle is a published author and has contributed to manuscripts and presentations focused on neurocognition and community-engaged research. Notably, she contributed to pioneering inclusion efforts in Alzheimer’s disease research in a manuscript describing the efforts of the Diversity Taskforce of the third iteration of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI3), published in JAMA Network Open (Okonkwo & Rivera Mindt et al., 2024; https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.27073).

Annabelle also has a scientific publishing background, given her interest in research communication with clinical implications. She enjoyed working at Elsevier, where she supported internationally-based publishers and editorial boards of leading psychiatry and neurology journals  (e.g., Biological Psychiatry), and analyzed and reported trends in journal performance.

In her free time, Annabelle enjoys being creative through dance and photography. She also enjoys reading to Unwind (and is very excited about helping with the Cope Center’s after-school program)!