I am working as a Senior Research Scientist for the Wikimedia Foundation, where I use data to understand and empower millions of readers and contributors who interact with Wikipedia and its sister projects on a daily basis.
My work focuses in the area of Knowledge Gaps with the aim of understanding and addressing the structural inequalities in Wikimedia projects and the online ecosystem more generally. Specifically, I have been contributing to this program by, for example, understanding readers and how they navigate Wikipedia; developing machine learning models to support newcomer edtitors; or building tools and packages that make it easier to work with publicly available data from Wikimedia projects. You can find more details about my work on my user-page on Meta-Wiki.
My original background and training is in theoretical Physics. I obtained my PhD at the Max Planck Insitute for the Physics of Complex Systems with Eduardo Altmann. After that I spent several years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University with Luis Amaral.
The theme of my work has been towards understanding the dynamics of complex social systems – How do seemingly complicated macroscopic patterns emerge from simple rules determining the interaction of individuals? Combining statistical analysis of large datasets with mathematical tools from complex networks and machine learning, I have worked on a variety of topics: topic models and community detection in complex networks; the production of scientific knowledge and evolution of scientific fields; modeling language change; statistical laws in linguistics and complex systems more generally; as well as personality and individual differences.