biography

I was born in Lagunillas, Venezuela; completed my undergraduate studies in Physics at the Universidad Simón Bolivar (Caracas) in January 1999. Starting in March of the same year I entered the Master in Sciences Program at the Universidad Central de Venezuela where I graduated in May 2001 with a thesis titled “Renormalization approach to solve two-phase flow equations in porous media”. This research was developed as a Student Internship at PDVSA-Intevep (The Research Laboratory of the National Oil Industry in Venezuela). Right after I got a position as a Senior Researcher at Intevep, working two years for the Reservoir Engineering & Simulation Department. In April 2003 I moved to the Institute of Computer Applications (ICP) from Universität Stuttgart (Germany) to pursue my PHD as a selected fellow from DAAD (The German Academic Exchange Service). As entitled in my PHD thesis “Contact Networks of mobile Agents and Spreading Dynamics” (ISBN 3-8325-1318-3, July, 2006), I developed a research field that combines networks theory and spatial dynamics (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 088702 (2006)). Since August 2006 I am a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR), first located at Notre Dame University (South Bend, IN) and now at Northeastern University (Boston, MA). I apply techniques of Statistical Physics to extract meaningful information from huge data bases driven by human dynamics; the aim of this kind of research is commented in Nature Physics 3, 224–225 (2007). In particular my interests have focused in “Understanding individual human mobility patterns” (Nature 453, 479-482 (2008)), using data from mobile phone communication at a country scale.