About Me

Full CV -> PDF

I’m a professor in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Previously, I was an associate professor at Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) in Spain, Researcher and Visiting Professor at MIT Media Lab and Researcher at University of Oxford. A native from Salamanca (Spain) I hold a PhD in Physics and I am an affiliate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. I have published extensively throughout my career and have led many projects funded by government agencies and private companies. Also served as jury in many Data Science and Big Data challenges, as editor of several journals and has advised many PhD students.

My work lies in the intersection of big data and computational social science, with special attention to human dynamics, collective intelligence, social networks and urban mobility in problems like viral marketing, natural disaster management, food accessibility, or economical segregation in cities. Apart from my academic career I have worked closely with companies like Twitter, Telefónica or BBVA in the use of massive datasets to understand problems like how humans communicate, how political opinion spreads in social networks or building alternative well-being indexes. I have received numerous awards for my research, including the “Shared University Award” from IBM in 2007 for my research in modeling viral marketing in social networks and the “Excellence in Research” Awards in 2013 and 2015 from UC3M.

Our work appeared in major journals including Nature Human Behavior, Nature Communications, PNAS or Science Advances and is regularly covered by media outlets The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, El País (Spain).

Here is a brief description of my career

  • [1971] Born in Salamanca, Spain.
  • [1994] M.Sc. Universidad de Salamanca, Spain.
  • [1999] PhD in Physics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
  • [1999-2001] Research Assistant & Marie Curie Fellow, Theoretical Physics Department, University of Oxford, U.K.
  • [2001] Teaching Assistant, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
  • [2003-2007] Ramón y Cajal researcher, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
  • [2009-2014] Technical leader at Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento, Spain.
  • [2015-2017] Academic Director at AFI Escuela de Finanzas, Spain.
  • [2016-2019] Visiting Professor at MIT Medialab, US.
  • [2007-2023] Associate Professor, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.
  • [2019-2023] Research Scientist, SSRC MIT, US.
  • [2024-present] Professor at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University.

And a little bit about my publications
(last update 2024-11-06. Data from Google Scholar, retrieved using the scholar package in R)

  • You can find a list of my publications here
  • My h-index now is 41
  • I have received 8358 citations to 157 publications/documents
  • Here is the distribution of my citations since 2010

  • This is the network of my top co-authors (red) and their top co-authors (blue) (you can interact with the visualization)