Mariano Sigman

Mariano Sigman was born in Argentina and grew up in Barcelona, Spain. He obtained a Master's Degree in Physics at the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in New York. He moved to Paris to investigate decision making, cognitive architecture, and consciousness. In 2006 he founded the Integrative Neuroscience Laboratory, at the University of Buenos Aires, an interdisciplinary group integrated by physicists, psychologists, biologists, engineers, educational scientists, linguists, mathematicians, artists, and computer scientists.

His lab has developed an empirical and theoretical approach to decision making, with a special focus on understanding the construction of confidence and subjective beliefs. Many aspects of his investigation rely on data mining and computational tools on the massive corpus of human behavior, like texts and decision making. He has progressively shifted his research to understand how current knowledge of the brain and the mind may serve to improve educational practice. Many of the projects are conducted and developed at schools and he is extending these investigations on cognitive development to hundreds of thousands of children through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) framework.

Throughout his career, he developed numerous research interactions with representatives of different domains of human culture including musicians, professional chess players, mathematicians, magicians, visual artists, and chefs. Several of these interactions resulted in exhibits presented in museums and galleries in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the US, Japan, New York, Austria.

Mariano is the only Latin American scientist to be a director of the Human Brain Project, was awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the national prize of physics, the young investigator prize of “College de France”, the IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.