About this site:
I will be writing about my research, thoughts, and plans.
Short Bio:
I was born in Bogota, Colombia. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Physics in 2007 and a master degree in Industrial Engineering in 2008 from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. During my master I lived for four months in Santiago, Chile, and my research was in collaboration with the Complex Systems Group of the Physics Department at the Universidad de Chile. After completing my master, I worked for a year and a half as an analyst in the financial risk management division of Sociedades Bolivar S.A., a renowned Colombian firm of the financial sector. There, my work consisted of developing analytic, statistical and computational tools for identifying, assessing and managing financial risks.
During my undergraduate studies I mostly focused on Statistical Mechanics, and my thesis was a mathematical and computational study of a sandpile model in a scale-free network. Then, in my master thesis, I studied the fractal makeup of cities, modeling different planar street networks, and its effect on the distribution of city traffic. I found traffic to be a function of the size distribution of un-built or green places (such as parks).
Since 2011 I have been working together with the Santa Fe Institute's research group "Cities, Scaling and Sustainability", whose ambitious goal is the development of a "Science of Cities". In 2014, I completed a PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University, and I joined the Center for International Development at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher. I am interested in the universal statistical patterns that might be present across different urban systems, and what they might tell us about the mechanisms underlying wealth creation, the spread of diseases, the dynamics of crime, and population growth.
My current daytime job is at Analysis Group, Inc., an economic consulting firm, where I work in Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) as an Associate in the Boston office.
My research and work typically consists of a combination of:
Mathematical modeling, Big Data analysis, Machine Learning, with computational simulation of stochastic and/or deterministic models.
I will be writing about my research, thoughts, and plans.
Short Bio:
I was born in Bogota, Colombia. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Physics in 2007 and a master degree in Industrial Engineering in 2008 from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. During my master I lived for four months in Santiago, Chile, and my research was in collaboration with the Complex Systems Group of the Physics Department at the Universidad de Chile. After completing my master, I worked for a year and a half as an analyst in the financial risk management division of Sociedades Bolivar S.A., a renowned Colombian firm of the financial sector. There, my work consisted of developing analytic, statistical and computational tools for identifying, assessing and managing financial risks.
During my undergraduate studies I mostly focused on Statistical Mechanics, and my thesis was a mathematical and computational study of a sandpile model in a scale-free network. Then, in my master thesis, I studied the fractal makeup of cities, modeling different planar street networks, and its effect on the distribution of city traffic. I found traffic to be a function of the size distribution of un-built or green places (such as parks).
Since 2011 I have been working together with the Santa Fe Institute's research group "Cities, Scaling and Sustainability", whose ambitious goal is the development of a "Science of Cities". In 2014, I completed a PhD in Applied Mathematics at Arizona State University, and I joined the Center for International Development at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher. I am interested in the universal statistical patterns that might be present across different urban systems, and what they might tell us about the mechanisms underlying wealth creation, the spread of diseases, the dynamics of crime, and population growth.
My current daytime job is at Analysis Group, Inc., an economic consulting firm, where I work in Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) as an Associate in the Boston office.
My research and work typically consists of a combination of:
Mathematical modeling, Big Data analysis, Machine Learning, with computational simulation of stochastic and/or deterministic models.
Research questions I'm passionate about
- How does urban output arise from diversification of productive capabilities in cities?
- How does the "division of collective know-how" emerge and evolve in societies?
- Can we predict/forecast which socio-economic activities will appear in a city (such as a new industrial activity, or new crimes, or diseases), given its current characteristics?
- Are there dynamical laws that drive the evolution of the export baskets of countries?
- What is "collective learning", and how it differs from a process in which a collective of individuals learn?
- Are invention and innovation, as observed in the record of patents, the result of a process of collective learning (aka, "cultural accumulation")?
- How much does a city, as a collective, know?
General interests: Cities, Economic Development, Epidemiology, Crime, Complex Systems.