Barcelona

Andreu Casas

Andreu Casas is an Assistant Professor in Political Communication at Royal Holloway University of London in the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, and a Faculty Associate in the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University. He is a computational political scientist working on political communication, public policy, legislative politics, and computational methods. The substantive goal of his research is to build a better understanding of the policymaking process, broadly speaking, in the current digital society. His research in political communication and public policy looks at how social media has shaped collective action dynamics; how social movements, interest groups, political parties, as well as the public, use public communications to influence the political agenda; the role of (social) media in increasing/ameliorating polarization; and the regulation of political speech by social media companies. His research on legislative politics looks at the conditions under which individual legislators and legislative groups influence policy through less prominent (e.g. amendments) and more informal (e.g. bundling legislation) mechanisms. He develops and/or applies novel computation methods (text-as-data and images-as-data) that allows to unlock important (classic and new) research questions that cannot be addressed otherwise.

Chico Camargo

Chico Camargo is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. His research interests cover the intersection of computational social science, complex systems, political communication, data science, cultural evolution, cultural sociology, and information theory. 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 written for Science, HuffPost Brazil, The Conversation, and produced over 50 videos for YouTube.

Laia Castro

Laia Castro is an assistant professor in the department of Political Science at University of Barcelona and research associate at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Her research involves empirical work on political communication, comparative media research & public opinion, with a particular focus on cross-cutting exposure and communication across political lines. She was assistant professor at the Faculty of Communication at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya - Barcelona and a senior researcher at the Department of Communication & Media Research at University of Zurich. Laia holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Fribourg, and studied Political Science at University Pompeu Fabra (BA) and Political Communication and Marketing at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (MA). For more than seven years, she has also worked as a political advisor and assistant at several Catalan institutions.

Xavier Fernández i Marín

Xavier Fernández i Marín is a 'Ramón y Cajal' fellow at the Universitat de Barcelona. He develops and tailors solutions for social science research methods, including current developments in Bayesian inference, data visualization, probabilistic programming, experimental designs and machine learning. He has substantial contributions in comparative politics, public administration, public policy, international relations and psychology. Xavier has worked in the fields of global governance and IGOs, the diffusion of policies and institutions and the processes of development of regulatory agencies. He has a also worked on Internet and e-Government diffusion and other related aspects of the public management of the Information Society, which lately include the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in public administration.

Camilo cristancho

Camilo Cristancho is a Ramon y Cajal research fellow at the Political Science Department, Universitat de Barcelona. His research focuses on protest, interest groups, and elite behaviour with a comparative approach in Europe and Latin America. He works with computational linguistics, social network analysis and experimental methods. His most recent projects study public attitudes and elite responsiveness to protest, affective polarization, and public emotions in contentious times. He was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po, Paris, and has collaborated with different government institutions on policy implementation and evaluation projects. His work in political communication, political sociology, and political science has been published in Europe, the US and Latin America.

Andreu Rodilla

Andreu Rodilla is a PhD candidate at University of Barcelona (UB) and at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). His research focuses at the intersection of judicial politics and legislative studies. In particular, he studies how courts influence the legislative process from an empirical perspective. In this sense, he analyses legislative and legal text from a quantitative point of view.

Luis Remiro

Luis Remiro is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona. His research primarily explores political behaviour, political culture, and quantitative research methods, with a special focus on affective polarisation and voters' attitudes towards institutions. He examines the factors driving affective polarisation in Latin America, including elite behaviour, the role of leaders in shaping political identities, and how democratic backsliding can drive affective polarisation. Additionally, he regularly contributes to various media outlets (online, radio, and television) and forums to discuss Venezuelan politics and electoral behaviour.