Area: Complex Biological, Social and Sociotechnical Systems
Specific focus: Origins of intelligent behavior

Routine dynamics, Agent-based modeling, Computational social/organization science, Industrial systems engineering, etc.

My interests lie in the intersection of economics, networks, and computation. I am currently studying labour dynamics as a process where people flow throughout the economy by moving from one firm to another. I study these flows by looking at detailed data about employment histories of each individual and every firm in entire economies. Using this information, I construct networks of firms in order to map the roads that people take throughout their careers. This allows to study labour markets at an unprecedented fine-grained level of detail. I employ agent-based computing methods to understand how economic shocks and policies alter labour flows, which eventually translate into unemployment and other related problems.

The Ph.D. research project is mainly focused on the study of the influence of emotional intelligence inside decision-making processes and on the social and emotional aspects of organizations.Furthermore, the research has taken into account the generative science paradigm: in this way, the general aim is the development of social simulations able to account organizational processes related with emotions and with the emotional intelligence from the bottom-up.

I am fascinated by unraveling water-scarcity patterns. I am an expert in Integrated Assessment Modelling and Water Footprint Assessment. The concepts and tools that I have developed and applied all aim at availing knowledge at scales relevant to decision-makers in the water sector. During my PhD at the University of Twente I evaluated how spatiotemporal patterns of water availability relate to patterns of water use for a river basin in the semi-arid Northeast of Brazil. I have used agent-based modelling and developed the downstreamness concept to analyze the emergence of basin closure. This concept is helpful to water managers for identifying priority locations for intervention inside a river basin system. As a postdoc I continued to evaluate the relation between water use and availability and further broadened my scope to a wider range of related topics.

I am interested in questions of method, and in the application of computational social models to a wide variety of national security questions (such as counterterrorism and counterinsurgency) as well as decision-making around complex natural resources such as water. My methods interest center on the use of qualitative social theory to inform the structure of computational social models, and the ways in which such models handle qualitative data. This raises questions around the nature of data and the ways in which computational social models convey information to decision-makers.