Silvia Benavides Varela is an Assistant Professor affiliated to the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology and Department of Neurosciences at Padua University.

She completed her training as biotechnology engineer with honors in Costa Rica (TEC) and obtained a Ph.D in Neuroscience from SISSA, Trieste. She then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the IRCSS San Camillo Hospital in Venice, and the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (CNRS & Université Paris Descartes), in Paris, France. The most important part of her research focused on developing new methods for unveiling the initial state of memory capacities in humans, the environmental factors that modulate learning, and the properties of the brain systems that support language and mathematic achievements across the life-span. She uses a range of neuroimaging techniques in combination with behavioral metrics and analyses, both in healthy and in clinical populations. In recognition of her empirical contribution to the scientific research, her work has been entitled 2 Dissertation Awards (by International Conference for Infant Studies in 2012 & Italian Association of Psychology in 2013), honorable mention as outstanding young researcher (2013), and the best publication in the field of developmental psychology (Italian Association of Psychology in 2016). Her work has been previously financed through a competitive collaborative grant from the Italian Ministry of Research (PRIN-2017), an individual grant from Padua University (MINI project within the STARS program 2020) and from Pfizer (2020).