Short bio

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Network and Data Science at the Central European University (CEU), Vienna, Austria.

I have received my Habilitation in Theoretical Physics at the University of Bremen in 2017. Previously, I have been an Assistant Professor in Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath (2016-2019), External Researcher at the ISI Foundation (2015-2020), and post-doc researcher at the University of Bremen (2011-2016) and Technical University of Darmstadt (2008-2011).

I have received my PhD in Physics at the University of São Paulo in 2008.

My research group works at the interface between Computational Statistics, Information Theory, Bayesian Inference, Machine Learning, and Statistical Physics, and has as its main focus the methodological foundations of Network Science and the study of Complex Systems.

Me (left) receiving the notorious Karate Club Club trophy from Travis Martin (right), on behalf of the 5th recipient, Mark Newman, in 2015.

My work was recognized with the Erdős–Rényi Prize from the Network Science Society in 2019.

I also received a Alexander von Humbolt Foundation fellowship in 2008.

And most importantly, I’m the proud 6th recipient of the distinguished Karate Club Club prize. 🥋🏆

About myself

I’m a nerd; I do things for the innate pleasure of doing them, not fame and fortune (“Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.”) Details are everything. I’m a proponent of rigorous intellectual promiscuity. Data compression is a really cool and robust paradigm for scientific inquiry, and I wish more people would recognize that. People that insist in labelling themselves “non-Bayesians” are total dorks. Programming is a stress-relieving activity for me, and I wish I had more time to devote to it. Free Software \(\gg\) Open Source. Contrary to what may seem, I spend surprisingly little time thinking about network visualizations.