Edward Salter - CEO
Edward leads the commercial direction of Coalescent Cognition, including client relationships, strategy, and capital. He brings nineteen years in institutional financial markets, the last fifteen spent practising the discipline this company is built on, making consequential decisions under uncertainty with capital at risk.
From 2012 to 2025 he led the Euribor Options desk at Chicago Trading Company, running a market-making strategy through several major shifts in the rates landscape, and most recently ran a proprietary interest rate derivatives strategy at DV Trading. That work is the practical form of the methodology behind Coalescent Cognition, maintaining a calibrated view under uncertainty, separating genuine edge from noise, updating as new information arrives, and managing the gap between confidence and accuracy.
Edward read Chemistry at Oxford (University College, MChem) and earlier worked on the rates desk at Merrill Lynch. He has known Stephen Fleming since university.
Professor Stephen M. Fleming- CSO
Stephen is the architect of the methodology underlying Coalescent Cognition, a direct extension of the research programme he has led for nearly two decades. He is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where he founded and leads the Metacognition Group, and a Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry.
His work on confidence, introspection, and self-awareness has been recognised with the Royal Society's Francis Crick Medal (2025), a European Research Council grant, the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal, and the Philip Leverhulme Prize. His 2021 book Know Thyself has been translated into seven languages and featured in the Financial Times and on the cover of New Scientist.
As co-founder and CSO, Stephen leads the scientific direction of the company, the validation programme, and the academic collaborations through which the methodology continues to develop. He retains his professorship at UCL.