Odalis Garcia earned her PhD in Psychology (with a focus on Health and Social Psychology) at North Dakota State University. Her research examined when and for whom stressors and negative emotional experiences detrimentally impact sleep, dreams (particularly nightmares), and health. She also earned her MS in Psychology at NDSU, where she worked on validating a novel measure of dream assessment, a project funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, she was a McNair Scholar at the University of North Texas, where she earned her BA in Psychology.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Odalis is interested in understanding how racialized stressors perpetuate cardiovascular health disparities both directly and indirectly through sleep and nightmare reactivity. In collaboration with Dr. Jacob Cheadle, she aims to identify the social, psychological, and biological processes involved in these relationships and the cultural resilience factors that may attenuate their effects.