David Garcia has been a professor of social and behavioral data science since October 2022 at the University of Konstanz, in Germany. Funded by the Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators Call of (WWTF, David built a research group at the Complexity Science Hub on the subject of “emotional well-being in the digital society” from 2017 until 2022.

David holds computer science degrees from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, in Spain, and ETH Zurich, in Switzerland. David did a PhD and Postdoc at ETH Zurich, working at the chair of systems design.

His research focuses on computational social science, designing models and analysing human behaviour through digital traces. His main work revolves around the topics of emotions, polarization, inequality, and privacy, combining statistical analyses of large datasets of online interaction with computational models. His thesis “Modeling collective emotions in online communities” provides an example of how agent-based modeling can be used to construct an integrated approach to collective emotional phenomena in cyberspace. His postdoctoral research on opinion polarization and online privacy has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the ETH Risk Centre.

David’s work lies at the intersection of various scientific disciplines, combining methods from network science, computer science, and statistical physics to answer questions from psychology and sociology. His interdisciplinary collaborations span more than 50 co-authors in 15 countries. David has published more than 60 articles in prestigious journals and serves as editor and reviewer for various journals and computer science conferences.