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 2004 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, 2008 in press), using data from mobile phone communication at a country scale.