I am interested in developing mathematical theory to address major biological questions. Some of the questions I have addressed include why did the human brain size evolve, how development affects evolution, what caused major evolutionary transitions, and what is a species? In these pursuits, I have obtained mathematical tools to integrate development and evolution, to model human brain size evolution, and to predict how dynamical systems respond to intervention. My work has found that the human brain size can evolve because of ecology and culture rather than sociality, that brain size may be mechanistically related to cognitive ability by a simple equation, that development plays major evolutionary roles, that eusociality can evolve from ancestral conflict that becomes a kin mutualism, and that species may be overlapping.

I finished my undergraduate degree in Biology in 2006 at the University of Antioquia, in Medellín, Colombia, where I am originally from. I finished my PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2013 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the USA, with Sergey Gavrilets as supervisor. I then did a postdoc until 2016 at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, with Laurent Lehmann as supervisor. I subsequently obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, held until 2018 at the University of St Andrews, UK, with Andy Gardner as supervisor. I remained in St Andrews as a postdoc until 2024, with Andy Gardner as supervisor.

Website: https://mauriciogforero.github.io