Role: Research Assistant

Pilar is a Msc Psychology (Conversion) City St George’s, University of London graduate currently working at The Listening Place, a charity that offers free face-to-face support across London to people who are experiencing suicidal feelings. Her previous research has focused on how women conceptualise the meaning of motherhood after undergoing social egg freezing.

Lauren Fetzko is a recent graduate of the MSc in Clinical, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience program at City St. George’s, University of London. During her studies, she interned under Dr. Vasanti Jadva, contributing to an ongoing study developing an inclusive psychometric scale measuring prenatal bonding across diverse family structures. This work informed her thesis, Prenatal Bonding Across Expectant Parents: Foundations for an Inclusive Measure, which identified common themes among expectant parents regardless of gestational status to generate preliminary items for future validation. She now works as a project assistant for the ReproFam website and is collaborating with Fertility Europe to develop a hub featuring accessible research summaries for patients, answers to common fertility questions, and materials that can be translated and adapted for use across different European countries.

Marie-Rose Lépine (She/Her) is a PhD candidate in Psychology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), under the supervision of Professor Isabel Côté. Her research focuses on reproductive health, with particular interests in perinatal grief, assisted reproduction, and diverse family structures. Her doctoral thesis explores perinatal grief among surrogate mothers. Marie-Rose primarily uses qualitative methods and has a growing interest in psychometrics. She is a research assistant at the Canada Research Chair in Third-Party Reproduction and Family Ties (https://crcppa.uqo.ca/en), contributing to projects on donor conception fraud and surrogacy. She is also an honorary research assistant at the FINCH Lab at City St-Georges, University of London, where she collaborates with Professor Vasanti Jadva on the development of an inclusive scale to measure prenatal bonding across diverse family structures. Additionally, she is a student member of the Familles en mouvance research partnership at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS – https://partenariat-familles.inrs.ca/membres-etudiants/).