My research goal is to understand statistics and probability with more depth, and then combine the learnings with engineering to make relevant contributions to society. Right now my work is focused on understanding social interactions through data. Projects comprised in this include estimating the effect of food availability in public health with mobility data, describing the economic effect of COVID in Mexico with transactional data, and also estimating how much do bees fly using genetic data from samples. On these projects, I am fortunate to have been supervised by professors Anette Hosoi, Esteban Moro, Sandy Pentand and Munther Dahleh. Something I enjoy of the interdisciplinary nature of my work is it has also led me to collaborate and learn from wonderful experts in diverse fields, such as Biology (Francisco García Bulle and Ross Gloag) and Psychology (Kayla de la Haye).

An intervention project I’m working on right now is with my bright colleague Salome Aguilar. We started a tutoring program in Mexico called “Jovenes ayudando a niñas y niños” where we use an RCT setting to find the best ways to form groups of children for tutoring, and more than 2,000 kids have received weekly tutoring in the program. Before starting my PhD, I got my BA in Economics and MsC in CS (Fortunately advised by Enrique Seira and Alejandro Noriega), cofounded a start-up that provided online psychometric tests to schools for career counseling and board-level decision-making, and worked with the Colombian government on their poverty estimation metrics to improve their targeting of social programs.