Susana Carmona

I am a mother of a 10-year-old funny girl. I’m also a neuroscientist and the head of the Neuromaternal Research Group at the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute in Madrid. My lab has led international efforts to characterise the maternal brain using neuroimaging, fluid biomarkers, and neuropsychological assessments. I have led several projects on the topic and authored 65 scientific articles, some of them in top journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and Science Advances. I also co-lead the pregnancy and motherhood working groups in two major initiatives: ENIGMA Neuroendocrinology and the Ann S. Bowers Women's Brain Health Initiative. Beyond academia, I’m deeply committed to science communication. I have written a book for the general public on the maternal brain, which has sold more than 30,000 copies, won the 2025 "Ciencia con Ñ" Award for the best science communication work in Spanish, and has been translated into more than seven languages, including English by MIT Press. My outreach project @neuromaternal has built a community of over 122,000 followers worldwide.

The maternal brain

Pregnancy has traditionally been viewed as an intense, yet "neck down" phenomenon. Our research has shown that pregnancy also produces profound and long-lasting changes in the brain—adaptations even larger than those occurring during adolescence. These brain changes are linked to gestational hormones and facilitate the transition to motherhood by promoting maternal well-being and mother-infant bonding. This discovery has the potential to unlock essential questions about perinatal mental disorders, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in developed countries. However, to truly advance the field, we need sustained funding to create a large-scale, comprehensive longitudinal database that can feed AI's algorithms, enabling us to predict and prevent mental health disorders.

I started my PhD in neuroscience in 2004. By then, we already knew what happens in the brains of London taxi drivers, and we had even mapped brain activity during orgasm. To give you a sense of when these studies were published—around 1999–2000—the number one song in the world was “…Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. In fact, since the early days of MRI research in the 1980s, we have been using neuroimaging to answer all sorts of fascinating questions about the human brain. And yet, there was one fundamental question we had no clue about: What happens in a woman’s brain when she becomes a mother? Or, in other words, what happens in the brains of those who give life to humanity? It wasn’t until 2017—when songs like “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi were playing on the radio—that we began to address this gap. From a small lab in Spain, we conducted the first longitudinal study tracking the brain as women transition into motherhood. What we found was striking. Pregnancy reshapes the brain in profound and dynamic ways—changes that are even more pronounced than those seen during adolescence. These changes are not random. They are at least partially driven by gestational hormones and appear to support something essential: a mother’s well-being and mother-infant bonding. But there is another side to this story. Because a very plastic brain can also be very vulnerable. Perinatal depression affects nearly one in five women, and in developed countries, suicide is one of the leading causes of death during this period. And the most striking part? Many of these deaths could be prevented if only we could identify risk early enough. To do that, we first need to understand how a woman's brain “typical” changes during pregnancy and postpartum. Only then can we detect when something deviates from that path. This is what we do in my laboratory, Neuromaternal. And I’d love to tell you more.