Chico Q. Camargo

Short bio

Chico Camargo is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He studies how ideas spread and evolve, mixing data science with theories about human behaviour, culture, and society.

Not so short bio

Chico Camargo is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He is also the Computational Social Science Theme Lead at the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Deputy Director at the Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science, Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Visiting Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and director of the CC Lab. He studies how ideas spread and evolve, mixing data science with theories about human behaviour, culture, and society. He is also a science communicator, having already written for Science, HuffPost Brasil, The Conversation, and produced more than 50 videos for YouTube.

Longer bio

Chico Camargo is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter, a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, member of the Complex Systems Society Council, Computational Social Science Theme Lead at the Exeter Institute for Data Science and AI, Deputy Director at the Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science, Visiting Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, and director of the CC Lab. He studies how ideas spread and evolve, mixing data science with theories about human behaviour, culture, and society. His work, developed in multidisciplinary collaborations with physicists, psychologists, mathematicians, anthropologists, journalists, and political scientists, has resulted in multiple knowledge exchange opportunities with policymakers.

Chico is also an experienced science communicator, having written for Science, HuffPost Brazil, The Conversation, and produced over 50 videos for large audiences on YouTube, and is currently one of the directors of Science Vlogs Brazil.

Before joining the University of Exeter, Chico was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where he worked with Scott Hale studying the dynamics of public opinion, political volatility, agenda setting and human mobility. Prior to that, he did his D.Phil. (PhD) in Systems Biology, also at Oxford, as a Clarendon Scholar in Brasenose College. In his PhD research, working with Ard Louis, he used tools from complex systems and machine learning to investigate the physical principles that rule biological evolution. During his PhD, he also worked with Kevin Foster and William (Mack) Durham developing a computational pipeline to analyse bacterial collective behaviour, and before that, he was an academic visitor at the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, working with Philip Maini and Ruth Baker. Before moving to the UK, Chico graduated with a BSc from the University of São Paulo, as part of the Molecular Sciences Programme, and worked in mathematical modelling of biological processes at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the State University of São Paulo, working with Roberto Kraenkel and Frederico Gueiros Filho.