Renee Penalver

Dr. Renee Penalver is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB). She earned her Bachelor’s in Psychology from CSUB (2011) and a PhD in Social Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where her doctoral work focused on bilingual memory. Her research explores bilingualism’s impact on cognitive processes, particularly episodic and source memory, semantic clustering, and language proficiency effects.

• Education:
• Bachelor’s in Psychology, CSUB (2011)
• PhD in Social Cognitive Neuroscience, UTEP

Her research interests span Cognitive Neuroscience and Bilingual Memory, investigating how bilingualism shapes memory encoding, retrieval, and neural mechanisms. Recent work addresses how word frequency and language proficiency influence memory accuracy and semantic associations across languages. She has published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition and Memory.

No scientific awards or grants are explicitly mentioned. No advisees or lab affiliations are listed.