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. Previously, I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, where I am still a faculty affiliated with the iLCSS 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.
My research has been published at the Journal of Communication, Comparative Political Studies, Nature Scientific Reports, International Journal of Press/Politics, and PLOS ONE, among other influential academic journals. My research has been awarded with grants from Project Liberty Institute, Tech & Public Policy Initiative at Georgetown, and EGAP, and recognized as the 2024 APSA’s Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award and Best Paper Award in Internet, Technology and Politics, the Best Paper in Political Behavior in the 2024 Brazilian Political Science Association Conference, and the 2022 Mario Fuks Award for the best paper presented in the Political Behavior Section in the Brazilian Political Science Political.
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.
Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science, 2022
University of Maryland, College Park
Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science, 2018
State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Ba in Law, 2010
Federal University of Para, Brazil
Data Science I: Foundations - Master Level Course at Data Science and Public Policy Program, McCourt School, Georgetown University, 2023
Introduction to Computational Social Science - Undergraduate Seminar at FGV-CPDOC, 2021
Collecting and Analyzing Social Media Data - Big Data Conference at University of Pennsylvania, 2022
Data Processing and Text Analysis / Scrapping and Big data - Two week workshop at IPSA-Flacso Summer School, 2021
Data Visualization (Tidying your model into a nice plot) -Student-led Workshop at UMD, 2020
Collecting and Analyzing Social Media Data with R - Workshop at The Federal University of Para, Brazil, 2019
How to build a R package? - Student-led Workshop at UMD, 2018
Introduction to Tidyverse - Student-led Workshops at UMD, 2018
R Crash Course - GVPT 489: Tweeting Political Crisis, 2018
You can download my CV here