Chico Q. Camargo

Short bio

Chico Camargo is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He is an interdisciplinary researcher who develops new computational methods to study the evolution of information.

Not so short bio

Chico Camargo is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter, a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and director of the CC Lab. In his research, he develops new computational methods to study the evolution of information, combining approaches from the natural and social sciences. 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 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, and director of the CC Lab. In his research, he combines approaches from the natural, social, and computational sciences to study the evolution of information. His research has been published in top-tier interdisciplinary journals (Nature Communications, Royal Society Open Science), as well as in the proceedings of world-leading computer science conferences (ICLR, ICML, and Complex Networks). 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.