Marisa received her B.A. in Neuroscience and Child Development with a minor in Women and Gender Studies from Vanderbilt University in 2017. Following graduation, she stayed at Vanderbilt to work as a lab manager in Dr. James Booth's lab on a project aimed at publicly sharing large neuroimaging datasets. She is currently a second-year graduate student under the mentorship of Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar. She is interested in studying how sensations from the body bidirectionally communicate with the brain and how these processes relate to physiology and behavior in peer-interactions.