Lena Adel is a PhD candidate in the Integrated Program in Neuroscience at McGill University, co-supervised by Dr. Michael Lifshitz and Dr. Guillaume Dumas (Université de Montréal). She’s a speech and language pathologist with a BSc from University of Potsdam, Germany, and completed her MSc in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Lena’s PhD research evolves around the question how interpersonal dynamics impact clinical encounters. Specifically, she studies the relationship between clinicians and patients in psychedelic therapy and the dynamics among family members and their therapist in systemic family therapy. Her methodology extends beyond conventional self-report techniques to include the analysis of biobehavioural synchrony among participants in therapy. This involves the use of tools such as dual ECG, EEG hyperscanning, analysis of movement synchrony, and linguistic assessments to understand how individuals in therapy coordinate their interactions at multiple levels. Lena is currently funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, her research is supported by McGill’s Healthy Brains Healthy Lives (HBHL), the Mindstrong campaign of the Jewish General Hospital and the Usona Institute.

In her spare time, Sara loves being active and spending time with friends and family. She greatly enjoys sport climbing, running, and hiking, as well as doing puzzles or curling up with a good book.