Izabel Aguiar

Starting at SFI October 2024

 

Izabel Pirimai Aguiar is an interdisciplinary mathematician from Golden, Colorado working on integrating social theory into the development of network analysis tools. The social sciences provide a wealth of relevant theories that serve as a cornerstone for approaching societal questions. Izabel believes it is essential that data scientists draw upon and contribute to this body of work when developing methodology used to study society. Izabel centers this framework in her approach to the study of social networks, which has long focused on understanding human behaviour and societal structure.

Izabel has her BS in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from the Colorado School of Mines and her MS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. She is finishing her PhD in Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University where she works with Johan Ugander. At Stanford she has been very happy and lucky and grateful to be an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar.

While at SFI, Izabel broadly aims to center an intentional and rigorous balance of fields that traditionally have been opposing: the quantitative and qualitative. She hopes that the careful, patient, and contextually informed data science she develops and practices will reveal insights about both our society and the ways we study it. Currently, Izabel is excited about developing such tools to study peoples’ perceptions about their social worlds and how their perceptions impact their realities.

Izabel believes that the world’s most important and delightful things are very, very small, and looking for them is her favourite thing to do.