Isabela is a Research Fellow at the School of Public Health UCC and the National Suicide Research Foundation. Her research is focused in mental health and suicide prevention in vulnerable groups such as older adults, individuals from ethnic minority backgrounds, and Low-and-Middle-Income settings. She has received funding from several national and international agencies, including her most recent award (2025-2028) from the Health Research Board on the Applying Research into Policy and Practice (ARPP) programme, for a 3-year fellowship titled Revisiting Suicide Prevention in Later Life: Human-centred approaches in an ageing Ireland. Previous to that, Isabela held a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2024) by the Irish Research Council for a study focusing on addressing risk factors and risk profile of older adults who self-harm.

From 2019-2021, Isabela was a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Health Research Board funded programme ‘Individual and Area Level Determinants of Self-Harm and Suicide in Ireland’. In her 2 years working in the HRB funded project, Isabela managed and co-led the development and implementation of an advanced skills training for health professionals supporting people who self-harm: Self-harm Assessment and Management Programme for General Hospitals (SAMAGH) Training Programme.

She trained and qualified as a Clinical Psychologist (2015) at University San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, and completed an MSc in Global Mental Health (2016) at King’s College London and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘Understanding self-harm behaviour in older adults was awarded PhD of the year (2020) by the UK's Society for Academic Primary Care.

• Global mental health
• Self-harm and suicide prevention
• Public mental health