Carmen Sandi is Professor at the Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she is Director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Genetics. She graduated in Psychology in the University Pontificia of Salamanca, Spain, in 1984, received a M.S. degree in Clinical Psychology and, in 1988, a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neurobiology based on work performed at the Cajal Institute (CSIC), Madrid. After postdoctoral work at the Cajal Institute, INSERM-University of Bordeaux, and The Open University, UK, she was recruited by UNED, Madrid in 1996. After a sabbatical stay at the University of Bern, Switzerland, she joined the EPFL in 2003. She has always been interested in understanding – at both phenomenological and mechanistic levels – how stress affects brain function, behavior and cognition. Her work has been pioneering in implicating stress hormones and associated pathways in memory consolidation, with more recent work demonstrating a key role of neural cell adhesion molecules in memory formation and in the mechanisms whereby stress-induced psychopathological alterations lead to cognitive disturbances. Her laboratory is also interested in the topic of individual differences, with ongoing research aimed to ascertain the role of personality traits and patterns of neural and endocrine activation to explain variability in the impact exerted by stress in different individuals. Finally, her lab is engaged in a series of European research programs devoted to develop cognitive enhancers and new drug treatments for stress-related mood and anxiety disorders.