Research
My research is interdisciplinary. It sits between computer science, network science and the social sciences, and I build it together with sociologists, political scientists, economists, physicists and climate scientists. I use digital traces to understand how the interplay between users, content and algorithms shapes digital societies, combining network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning and statistical inference, increasingly with large language models.
The work follows three lines. Polarization and echo chambers: how online fragmentation emerges from individuals, content and platforms, across elections, vaccines and climate change. Algorithmic mediation and agenda setting: who leads online debates, how content is consumed, and how to measure from the outside the visibility changes that ranking algorithms introduce. Cultural artifacts and collective behaviour: music, album covers, memes and language as a window on how culture and creativity evolve. I have also worked on misinformation, news consumption and human mobility during COVID-19.
I have published in PNAS, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, PNAS Nexus, Scientific Reports, EPJ Data Science, PLOS ONE and IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, and at NDSS and Findings of EMNLP. I contributed to a multidisciplinary review on a globally equitable understanding of political polarization (Nature Communications, 2026). I am an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE, review for Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, PNAS Nexus, EPJ Data Science and others, and serve on the programme committees of NetSci, NetSciX and Complex Networks.