Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and a faculty affiliated with the Massive Data Institute. Before joining Georgetown, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, where I remain a Faculty Research Affiliate. Previously, I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, and worked as a Misinformation Researcher at @Twitter.

My research deals with substantive issues on politics and social media, focusing on topics such as content activation and propagation, misinformation, and polarization on social media platforms. I am mostly interested in pursuing a comparative approach to these issues, paying special attention to Global South countries. Methodologically, I am interested in causal inference problems, online field and survey experiments, network models to deal with large volumes of data, and applications of natural language processing to social science problems.

Some of my current projects are a large-scale collaborative global social media deactivation study, a set of multimedia deactivation experiments on WhatsApp in Mexico, South Africa, and India, developing a large-scale panel connecting US voter files with their Twitter accounts, a field study investigating recommendation systems and censorship in Chinese social media, and field experiment increasing users’ exposure to fact-checking accounts on Twitter. I am also working on a book project with Natalia Aruguete and Ernesto Calvo titled News Sharing, Content Activation and Perceptions of Polarization on Social Media

I am a proud native of the North of Brazil, born and raised in Belém, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest Region. Before moving to the United States, I lived for many years in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is the most fun and beautiful city in the world. Like most Brazilians, I am is passionate about soccer, coffee, and samba.