Keynote Speaker on Burnout, Stress & the Nervous System

Born in São Paulo to a home marked by violence and poverty, no one would have expected Caroline to rise beyond it. At just thirteen, she worked two jobs and travelled three hours a day just to reach a better school, because education was the only way out she could see. Through sheer determination, she became a registered nurse, then a published researcher, and left Brazil for Wales with one suitcase and nothing guaranteed.

In Wales, studying psychology, she found the missing piece nursing had never given her: an understanding of how our experiences and emotions shape our behaviour, and the beliefs we carry about ourselves and the world. Then life in Ireland tested everything she'd learned, with losses and setbacks that would have stopped most people from building anything at all. What got her through wasn't the hardship itself. It was getting real help, and that difference is what turned her hardest years into something she could build on.

So she asked a different question: how do I take everything I've learned and do something with it? A nurse studying software engineering in Galway was not the expected next step, but Caroline finished with honours, and used it to do something no one else could have: design and build a clinical screening tool from the ground up. The structure, the logic, the clinical thinking behind every question, all hers, drawing on validated instruments psychologists already use, to map nervous system patterns the way she wished someone could have mapped hers.

With psychotherapy training now building directly on her psychology background, she's able to offer real, qualified help herself, not just point people toward it. It's the same instinct behind every talk she gives: healing isn't one moment of insight. It's built, deliberately, piece by piece, the same way she built everything else in her life. That's the honest take on healing she brings to a stage.