Mauro Miguel Monsalve Mercado, Ph.D.

Mauro Miguel Monsalve Mercado is an associate research scientist at Columbia University. He earned a bachelor of arts in physics from the National University of Colombia, a master of science in theoretical physics from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich, and a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His interdisciplinary training spans theoretical physics, differential geometry, machine learning and neuroscience, providing a quantitative foundation for studying the neural basis of cognition. He develops mathematical and computational methods to study how neural population dynamics arise from circuit organization and biological constraints.

Monsalve Mercado’s current projects seek to uncover the circuit mechanisms underlying neural computation by analyzing the geometric structure of activity recorded from hundreds of neurons simultaneously. To that end, he studies how cognition emerges from the collective activity of large neural populations, with applications to understanding how neural populations represent information, support decision making, spatial navigation, learning and internal models of the world. Across these domains, he focuses on identifying the general principles that govern how neural activity is organized in high-dimensional spaces and how those geometric structures relate to computation. By integrating geometry, dynamical systems theory, and large-scale neural recordings, he is developing mathematical frameworks that link biological mechanisms, neural representations and cognition.