Cristian Candia-Castro-Vallejo became the first Ph.D. of Social Complexity Sciences, a postgraduate degree awarded by the Faculty of Government of the Universidad del Desarrollo through its Center for Research in Social Complexity (CICS). In a ceremony open to the public he presented his thesis on the development of a multidisciplinary approach for the creation of a mathematical model that serves as a support to the existing theoretical framework for the analysis of complex systems.

 In an event attended by the Rector Federico Valdés Lafontaine, the Dean of the Faculty of Government, Eugenio Guzmán, and the Director of the CICS, Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert, the first Ph.D. of Social Complexity Science presented his research to the UDD community.

Cristian Candia-Castro-Vallejo, trained as a physical engineer at the Universidad de Concepción, joined the first generation of the program in 2014. With the work “Understanding Collective-Action-Systems Through a Computational Social Science Approach: Three Study Cases” he graduated with distinction after a process that included internships in the Collective Learning of the MIT Media Lab, led by his thesis co-tutor, César Hidalgo, and in the Barabasi Lab, led by the expert in Network Theory, László Barabási.

Rodríguez-Sickert, his thesis supervisor, highlighted the academic success and the institutional strengthening that the degree obtained by Candia represents for the CICS and the University. This is a milestone that marks the work developed with the Public Policy Center of the Faculty of Government, the Data Science Institute and the Center for Sustainability Research, both part of the Faculty of Engineering, which launched the program in 2014 and currently has 18 students.

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