Joseph D. Monaco Email & Phone Number

NIH/NINDS RoleJoseph Monaco, Ph.D., is a Scientific Program Manager in the Office of the BRAIN Director, where he evaluates scientific impacts of data, theory, and computational tools to guide BRAIN Initiative strategies for research data. Before joining the NIH in 2023, Dr. Monaco conducted computational neuroscience research for over 20 years focused on theory-driven computational modeling of hippocampal circuits and their role in spatial navigation and lifelong memory formation. He completed his doctoral studies on models of place cells and grid cells to obtain his Ph.D. at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. As a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Monaco developed statistical analyses linking movement to memory formation in rats, built models of how brains compute with neural oscillations, collaborated with experimental labs studying rats, flies, and monkeys, and helped lead an interdisciplinary collaboration to translate neuroscience theories into solutions for robotic control problems. Joe lives in Baltimore, where he spends his free time reading books about consciousness and trying to play Chopin.Research NarrativeI build theory-driven computational models of neural circuits and systems "in the loop" with animal behavior and feedback from environmental interaction. Broadly, I seek out the inductive theoretical valleys often shadowed by rising mountains of data, which collectively threaten to detract the capacity of neuroscience to interpret and understand the brain's complexities. My work has centered on spatial cognition and episodic memory and their deeply entangled duality within the hippocampus. From that foundation, my focus has been evolving toward more general theories of timing (e.g., oscillatory phase coding, flexible interareal communication) and dynamics (e.g., transitory attractors, heteroclinic trajectories) in the embodied interactions that underpin the cognitive computations of intelligence.Basic theoretical research like this is needed, now more than ever, to substantiate the views afforded by the neural data summits and to translate the resulting insights into applicable human neuropsychiatric knowledge of healthy vs. disordered or degenerative brain states. The overarching project is to build models, informatively data-constrained but theory-driven, that explain (or delineate the experiments needed to explain) how temporal and dynamical coordination in brain-body-environment systems enable intelligent agents to act on, and thus perceive, the world.

Listed skills include Mathematical Analysis, R, Computational Modeling, Neuroscience, and 15 others.