She spent a decade in the lab researching why high performers make decisions that contradict their own goals. Fear processing. Reward signaling. Decision-making under pressure. 8 published papers. Now she helps leaders see through those patterns — and change how they operate.
Florencia Bercum earned a BBA in Business Administration in Costa Rica. She spoke the language of strategy, ambition, and growth. But one question kept nagging at her — a question no business framework could touch: why do the smartest, most driven people keep making decisions that work against their own interests?
That question pulled her across continents. From Costa Rica to the University of Colorado Boulder, where she spent the next decade inside a research lab — not reading about neuroscience, but producing it. First as a Research Assistant, studying the roots of anxiety and impaired performance. Then designing her own experiments, tracking how the brain processes decisions under pressure in real time.
She earned her M.A. in Psychology in 2018. She kept going. She published. Paper after paper. She proved, with original data, that early life stress fundamentally rewires how people regulate fear and make decisions — long after the stress itself is gone.
By 2023, she had her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience, 8 published research papers (3 as lead author), and a decade of original data on the invisible patterns that silently govern human performance under pressure.
Then she moved to Prague. Postdoctoral research at Charles University, studying the hardest problem in the field: why certain destructive patterns persist even when every conventional approach says they should stop. That work gave her the final piece — not just how performance breaks down, but why the patterns behind it actively resist being changed.
And then she looked up from the data and asked the obvious question. Who actually needs this? The answer was immediate. The executives running on threat-response patterns calibrated for a life they outgrew years ago. The founders whose clearest thinking gets overridden at the exact moment the stakes are highest. The leaders who have read every business book on the shelf but have never once looked at the invisible patterns running underneath every decision they make.
She did the research. Then she brought it to the people who needed it most.
University of Colorado Boulder. A decade of doctoral research on fear, reward, and decision-making under pressure.
Published in leading scientific journals including the Journal of Neuroscience, Learning & Memory, and Physiology & Behavior. 3 as lead author.
Trilingual in English, Spanish, and Italian. Research career spanning Costa Rica, the United States, and Europe. A global lens on performance and human behavior.
Leadership beyond the lab. Served as Co-President of SACNAS, advancing diversity and representation in STEM at a national level.
Every insight at Neuropathways Center traces back to original, peer-reviewed research. Not popular psychology. Not someone else's findings repackaged. These are the papers.
A decade of original research on fear, reward, and decision-making — translated into practical insights for professional growth.
A decade of published science on fear, reward, and decision-making is sitting on the table. Your invisible patterns are not waiting for you to be ready. They are shaping your next decision right now.
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