leadership

For me, leadership is about creating the conditions for others to be their best. This means hearing, guiding, supporting, and coordinating efforts towards a common mission or goal.

Research leadership

Research supervision

I enjoy delving into research ideas, bringing people into them, and working on them together. So far, this has mostly taken the form of research supervision (MSc students, PhD project, Complexity72h project), where I
pitched project ideas that early-career researchers chose to join, and then guided them through. This has worked well, as shown by the resulting papers (WIVACE, Complexity72h) and awards (Best Dissertation for the Data Science MSc).

I regard supervision as a co-creation process, where I set up a problem and possible directions and then discuss a path to take based on skills, interests, ideas, and resource constraints. I place importance on having regular meetings to discuss methods and results and to hear about challenges and difficulties, so I can offer the right support. I understand that people have different needs, working styles, and personal life circumstances, and I adapt to account for these as much as possible.

Creating spaces for research interactions

The best ideas come from connecting what’s already there in unexpected ways. Therefore, breakthrough research needs spaces for exchanging ideas and points of view, particularly when they are quite diverse — e.g., with interdisciplinarity, but also from different personal and life experiences.

I enjoy creating points of connection for researchers to disseminate and discuss research together. Already during my PhD and postdoc, I created and guided meetings among PhD students within my research group to share their work or other interesting papers. These efforts have later grew in scale: I co-founded and ran a cross-departmental reading group on network science (University of Edinburgh), co-chaired an event for psychology and AI PhD students to share their research (BAIPsy), co-organised my institute’s internal research seminars (AIAI seminars 2022–2023) and organised a symposium about opinion dynamics bringing leading researchers from different departments to present their research and foster discussions.

Community leadership

I consider that researchers’ life and wellbeing are more important than the research they do — a weirdly bold statement. Wellbeing involves having motivation at work, not suffering from overwork and burnout, and having a rich social environment that can support them and provide a sense of belonging.

Therefore, I strongly value working at institutions and environments that make people’s wellbeing a top priority, while devoting resources to creating a healthy working environment where all sides of being human are welcome. Fortunately, this also leads to better research!

Alongside my research, I have consistently taken the initiative to improve the working environment around me and create peer communities, from re-launching and leading the Informatics Research Staff Society (IRSS) to serving on committees for other early-career communities (IAS Next Lead, Member of the CWI Activity Committee). I have continuously striven to actively create spaces (from tea gatherings to career and social events) where people can connect, ask for help, share advice, or just have fun together. I have also played a role in representing and advocating for the needs of such communities towards other stakeholders (IRSS, Buildings committee, AIM ECR Representative, AIC PhD Academic Representative), making sure that everyone, especially those in more precarious positions, has a voice.