Home
I work as a University Lecturer in Social Data Science at the University of Helsinki. I enjoy studying problems related to economics and policy interventions through the lens of computational social science. While most of my work is usually motivated from a research point of view, I frequently transform it into tools that are useful to economists in government departments, regulators, local authorities, and international organisations. By doing so, I not only try to generate real-work impact, but also to push for a normalisation in the use of computational methods in the social sciences. Currently, I work on topics related to labour markets, global development, housing markets, productivity, and government behaviour.
I am an economist with an interdisciplinary PhD in Computational Social Science (CSS). Before joining the University of Helsinki, I worked at the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow in the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Saïd Business School. Then, I held a joint appointment as Senior Research Fellow at University College London's Department of Economics and The Alan Turing Institute. Eventually, I transitioned full time to the Turing Institute, where I was the Head and then the Director of Computational Social Science Research. Currently, I also hold an Honorary Senior Research Fellowship at UCL's Faculty of Laws, and an External Fellowship in the Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias.
A substantial part of my work consists of transforming academic research into real-world tools, so I often collaborate with governments from different countries and major international organisations such as the UNDP, UNICEF, the World Bank and the IMF among several others. While I am passionate about developing frontier CSS research and translating it into policy tools, sharing my knowledge and experience through teaching is something I consider crucial to advance the social sciences. For this reason, I decided to return to a university setting, this time in the happiest country in the world, which is where I conducted the very first research that initiated the field of labour flow networks more than a decade ago. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I know very well the struggles that students undergo when trying to find programmes that can teach them proper CSS and how to use computational methods to address complex socioeconomic problems. Hence I am currently working on developing teaching curricula at the Centre for Social Data Science in the University of Helsinki. If you are interested in conducting graduate studies under my supervision or simply need advice about the CSS landscape, feel free to reach out.
You can find the open source code of all my projects in my GitHub at the bottom of this website. Alternatively, if you wish to learn about the Policy Priority Inference programme of research, please visit its official website: policypriority.org. Finally, if you are interested in complexity economics, computational social science, or development economics, take a look at my open-access book:
