I am working as a Senior Research Scientist for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Before that I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University with Luis Amaral and before that I did my PhD at the Max Planck Insitute for the Physics of Complex Systems with Eduardo Altmann.

I am interested in understanding dynamics of complex social systems – How do seemingly complicated macroscopic patterns emerge from simple rules determining the interaction of individuals, such as the spreading of new words in a community of speakers? In order to address these questions I combine statistical analysis of large datasets of human activity (for example millions of books from the past 5 centuries or millions of scientific publications from the past 50 years) with mathematical tools from complex networks and machine learning.

My research interests include:

  • Topic models and community detection in complex networks
  • Production of scientific knowledge and evolution of scientific fields (Science of Science)
  • Language change, statistical laws in linguistics and complex systems more generally
  • Personality / Individual Differences