Alia Mahama-Rodriguez is a Stuttgart and Berlin-based model and multidisciplinary artist, originally from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Her creative vision is deeply shaped by her rich multicultural heritage—rooted in her mother’s Spanish, Portuguese, and French lineage and her father’s Ghanaian Asante roots. Alia is fluent in Spanish, French, German, and Asante Twi.

Alia Mahama-Rodriguez holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience and a Master’s in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from the University of Texas at Dallas. She began her career as a Neural Engineer at Abbott Neuromodulation, developing clinical neurotechnologies for therapeutic brain stimulation. She later transitioned into academic research, focusing on Computational Neuropsychiatry.

Her work lies at the intersection of affective neuroscience, neuroimaging, and computational modeling, with an emphasis on maladaptive cognitive processes in psychiatric illness. Alia investigates disrupted decision-making, impaired self-regulation, and altered introspective capacity—core features of disorders such as schizophrenia, addiction, and hallucinosis. Her current research models protective cortical mechanisms in congenitally blind individuals to better understand resilience factors against schizophrenia, using a fusion of functional MRI, neuroeconomic paradigms, and transcriptomic data. She aims to identify mechanistic biomarkers of dysfunction and resilience at both behavioral and molecular levels.In addition to pursuing modeling, Alia serves as the Lead Technical Coding Instructor at BlackGirlsCode Dallas chapter and founded a nonprofit in 2019 where trauma-informed yoga classes are held free-of-cost to populations more susceptible to trauma/cPTSD (i.e. incarcerated inmates, sexual assault survivors, homeless shelters) and has served as a mentor in Women Mentoring Women in Engineering since 2021.

Currently, Alia is pursuing her Doctorate/PhD in Computational Neuroscience with a focus on Psychiatry at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

Direct further inquiries to contact@aliamahama.com.