The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University awards residential fellowships to exceptional scientists, scholars, and artists making a difference in their fields and the world. While immersed in individual or group projects, fellows convene to challenge and support each other’s ideas.
Department of Psychology
Eduardo Mercado III, PhD, professor of psychology, is an innovative scientist who investigates neural representations of acoustic events. An integrative and comparative researcher, his work employs techniques from experimental psychology, computational neuroscience, electrical engineering, and behavioral neuroscience to explore auditory learning, memory, and behavior in humans and other animals. For 2023-24, Mercado has received prestigious fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute to support his research on how humpback whales adjust their songs in response to their surroundings—work that radically contradicts the prevailing hypothesis suggesting why whales sing—and how this can provide warnings of changing ecosystems.
