THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Kalina Christoff, PhD

Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
2136 West Mall
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6T 1Z4

Tel: 604-603-3410
Fax: 604-822-6923
kchristoff@psych.ubc.ca

August 29, 2013

Letter for Reference
Re : Mara Lucia Puertolas

To whom it may concern :

I am very pleased to write this letter of recommendation for Mara Lucia Puertolas. I have
known Mara for more than a year, first in her capacity as a volunteer in my laboratory, then
as directed studies student and a research assistant. In addition to working closely with one
my graduate students, Mara worked directly under my supervision; she and I have had many
productive meetings and discussions in the course of which I had a chance of getting to know
her and her abilities quite well.
Mara has many enviable qualities and she continued to impress me throughout the time she
spent working under my supervision. She is very hard working and conscientious and knows
very well how to set her up her own goals and deadlines in order to drive a project to
successful fruition. About a year ago, she started working with me on a project to automate
the data acquisition for an online survey study, in which we are using LimeSurvey (a freesource PhP-based survey software) to gather information about the social, clinical, and
personal factors that determine women's experience of giving birth. This is a complex and
entirely online-executed research study, which I wanted to automate through PhP scripts, so
that the multiple questionnaires that each subject has to complete at pre-determined time preand post-birth are delivered to subjects automatically, instead of manually by a research
assistant. I also asked Mara to work on scripts that would automate all data extraction and
analysis from this study.
These two tasks would have daunted any other undergraduate student I know (and many
graduate students as well), especially given the complex technical nature of the project, the

Re: Mara Lucia Puertolas, Letter of Recommendation

specialist subject of the research project and the exhaustive nature of the questionnaires
involved in the study (we have more than 50 questionnaires that subjects complete). Both the
programming abilities and research coordination abilities required for this task are extensive.
I gave the task to Mara not knowing her abilities fully, hoping for the best but prepared that
she may not succeed given the enormous requirements for success. She exceeded all of my
expectations and in the course of the next year, successfully managed to automate both the
data extractions and script-driven survey invitation. The success of this task required her to
learn much about PhP programming, but also to successfully coordinate a collaboration with
two LimeSurvey programming experts from Germany and South Africa, with whom she was
in constant communication via email and skype conferencing. She was in charge of
implementing scripts that they wrote, as well as testing them and giving them feedback for
any changes that needed to be done.
Her ability to successfully carry out complex project management tasks and to communicate
effectively with multiple people in the course of this management was outstanding. In
addition, she also demonstrated excellent learning skills. When she first started, she hadn't
used Matlab yet, but in the course of several short months, she was successfully writing
Matlab scripts to extract data from the MySQL LimeSurvey database and using sophisticated
packages to integrated Matlab with MySQL.
In addition to her impressive technical skills and her ability to effectively communicate with
people of varying backgrounds, she also has excellent academic background and outstanding
skills for scientific work. She became involved with some functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging going on in my lab (fMRI), and she was about to start data collection on an fMRI
study whose preparation she had been working on, when she had to leave our lab in August
2013. Had she stayed, I have absolutely no doubts she would have picked up all the skills of
fMRI data acquisition and analysis within a few short months.
I have heard from several of her undergraduate professors, who were hugely impressed with
her performance in their classes, something entirely consistent with my observations. In
terms of academic preparation, she not only comes with solid background in Cognitive
Science and Psychology, but she also -- and perhaps much more importantly -- possesses the
rare ability to quickly learn new material in new fields. For example, when she first started
work in my laboratory, she didn't have any clinical or social psychology research
background. Because many of the questionnaires we use for the study of women's
experiences of giving birth are of clinical and social psychology nature, she had to quickly
learn the history of these measures and read through some extensive and complex literature
on these questionnaire's scoring and validity. She did that very successfully and rapidly: in
the course of several months, she had collected all the relevant scientific literature on each of
the 50+ questionnaires we are using and had figured out how to score and analyze the data
from each one of them.
In short, Mara possesses a rare intelligence, conscientiousness and work ethic, as well as an
admirable ability to communicate effectively and set goals and priorities. I believe this
combination of abilities will make her easily and extremely successful in any endeavour she
chooses to pursue in the future. I would accept her as a graduate student in my laboratory in

Re: Mara Lucia Puertolas, Letter of Recommendation

a heart beat, knowing that she would be hugely successful and a pleasure to work with.
Unfortunately for my laboratory, Mara plans to make the US her next home, after having
spent quite a number of years in Canada.
For whatever capacity or position you are considering her, I believe she would be a great
choice. All I have to say is: Grab her while you can!
If you require any further information, I would be glad to provide it. Please contact me
directly using the information below.

Kalina Christoff, PhD

Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
2136 West Mall
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6T 1Z4
Tel: 604-603-3410
Fax: 604-822-6923
Email: kchristoff@psych.ubc.ca

Re: Mara Lucia Puertolas, Letter of Recommendation