Research

I am a scientist researching the diversity and evolution of languages. I want to understand where the ~7,500 languages extant today come from (with a special emphasis in the last 12,000 years, the Holocene), how they will change in the advent of the human-machine era, and what is that languages have done to our species, our cognitions, behaviors, and cultures. I fully embrace a transdisciplinary and question-guided approach, drawing from data science, human biology, cognitive sciences, comparative linguistics, evolutionary anthropology, computational social sciences, natural language processing, and cultural evolution. A substantial proportion of my work involves inferences with small, sparse, incomplete, imbalanced, noisy and non-independent observational data (or s²i²n² for short).

My published research covers topics ranging from the emergence of new languages, pervasive form-meaning associations, the adaptability of speech sound systems, patterns of information packing , and the prehistory of worldwide linguistic diversity. All my articles are available in my Google Scholar profile (see below).

In addition to my strictly scientific interests, I apply insights from language diversity to concrete issues involving AI, medicine, education, technology, access to information, and other facets of human wellbeing.

About me

I am an ICREA Research Professor based at the Center for Brain & Cognition at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain), a National Geographic Explorer, and a Branco Weiss Fellow. In addition, I am also an external researcher at the Human Relations Area Files (Yale University, USA) and an associate of the Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab based at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and I serve as an ad hoc expert on linguistic diversity for UNESCO. I have been a recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Glushko Prize in Cognitive Sciences among other honors.

Previously I was a a Harvard Data Science Initative Fellow based at the Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab led by Joseph Henrich, based at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a research affiliate of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena (Germany) and the 2019-2020 Maury Green Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. Before I was postdoctoral researcher at the Comparative Linguistics Department at the University of Zürich (Switzerland) between 2015-2019. I received a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences while simultaneously I held an affiliation to the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, both institutes from Leipzig (Germany). I obtained my B.Sc. in Physics and M.Sc. in Interdisciplinary and Statistical Physics from the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche (Argentina).