María Elena Reverón Castelló was born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. She is the first-born child of Luis Reverón García and María de los Angeles Castelló Gómez, and she has two sisters. She majored in Pharmacy in June 1994 from the University of La Laguna, and she obtained a bachelor degree in Optometry in June 1995 from the University of Barcelona, Spain. She moved to the United States in summer 1998 to pursue her Ph.D. She obtained a M.S. degree at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), for her work in the possible neurotoxic effect induced by prolonged L-DOPA exposure in mice, under Dr. Gary Miller’s supervision. In Fall 2003, she joined Dr. Christine Duvauchelle’s laboratory at UT. Her dissertation work focused on the behavioral and neurochemical changes associated with long-term MDMA self-administration in rats.

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