About

EQness is led by Dr. Olga-Lucia Gamboa Arana with the goal to support people’s mental and emotional well-being using practical tools based on state-of-the-art research findings. 

Who is Olga-Lucia

Dr. Olga-Lucia Gamboa Arana is a Cognitive Neuroscientist, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Coach, Mindfulness and Dance teacher. She started as a physicist who got really interested in understanding human emotions and their consequences. 

Why? Because the laws of physics and the laws of the human mind and heart are so different!

That curiosity drove her to get a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and then to study Psychology. She got a specialization in emotional education and stress management, became a teacher of Mindfulness and Self Compassion (MSC), and a Life Coach.

Later, she got certified as a teacher of mindful eating (MB-EAT program) and got trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Currently, she is finalizing a master’s degree in Psychopathology, Clinical intervention, and Health. 

Research-wise, her main field of study has been brain plasticity, having more than 13 years of experience working with non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) methods combined with Neuroimaging such as electroencephalography (EEG) and fMRI. 

During her research, she has worked on projects investigating the improvement of brain functioning, the Neurophysiology of anxiety, working memory, reward processes, motion perception, and Intentional Forgetting. 

In her personal research project, she used different methodologies to investigate how people voluntarily forget or suppress their thoughts. 

Currently, she works as a researcher at the University of Sydney, and collaborate on different projects with the following universities:

• Project on Mindfulness and Fibromyalgia, University of Göttingen, Germany.
• Project on Women with Deep Endometriosis and Mindfulness, University of São Paulo, Brazil.
• Project on Brain plasticity and Alzheimer’s, Duke University, USA.

• A Randomized Controlled Trial of a brief Mindfulness-Based Intervention for the endometriosis-related pain management. (2022).M. Franca M, OL Gamboa, M.A. Pinho Oliveira 
• Association between severity of pain, perceived stress and vagally-mediated heart rate variability in women with endometriosis. (2021).M. Franca M, OL Gamboa, M.A. Pinho Oliveira. 
• Assessing the impact of mindfulness attitudes on attentional quality through focused breath induction. (2019). M. Franca, M. França M, G.K. Tanaka, . B. Velasques, M. Cagy M, P. Ribeiro P, OL Gamboa. 
• The challenge of forgetting: Neurobiological mechanisms of auditory directed forgetting. (2018).OL Gamboa*, K. Yuen*, M. Behrens, H. Steinmetz, F.von Wegner
• Suppress to forget: the effect of a mindfulness-based strategy during an emotional item–directed forgetting paradigm. (2017). OL Gamboa, J. García-Campayo, T. Müller, F.von Wegner. 
• Working memory performance of early MS patients correlates inversely with modularity increases in resting-state functional connectivity networks. (2014). OL Gamboa, E. Tagliazucchi, F.von Wegner, S. Borisov, M. Wahl, H. Laufs, U. Ziemann.