About
Mauricio A. Diaz
I am a physicist working at the intersection of computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research in Mainz, I develop neural-circuit models to investigate how stress shapes learning, adaptation and resilience.
More broadly, I am interested in how plasticity, neuromodulation and internal states regulate learning and adaptive behaviour.
Research
Chronic stress modelling in recurrent working-memory networks
Chronic stress as E/I perturbation in rate-based recurrent networks. Resilient networks stay robust under stress but generalise poorly to longer delays — a resilience–generalisation trade-off.
with Junior-Prof. Dr. Janina Hesse
Machine-learning approaches to resilience in mental health
Hierarchical Bayesian modelling of multivariate longitudinal data to capture population-level seasonality and improve individual predictions.
with Junior-Prof. Dr. Janina Hesse
hep-aid: sample-efficient parameter scans
A modular research-software framework for ML-based sampling in particle-physics phenomenology — Bayesian active search, MCMC and neural active sampling.
Education
Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics
University of Southampton, UK
M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
B.Sc. in Physics
Catholic University of the North, Chile