ERA Chair Team has been recruited: five new researchers join BIG ERA Chair project

The BIG ERA Chair project had completed the recruitment process for the BIG ERA Chair Team, which will be enriched with five new members. Teresa, Kevin, Mariana, Alfio, and David are the five names recruited by the PIs Nuno Nunes and Rodrigo Rodrigues.

In October, the first two, Kevin Gallagher and Mariana Pestana have joined as Invited Assistant Professors. Kevin is American and Irish and received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the Tandon School of Engineering of the New York University (2020). He has professional experience in Cybersecurity, and he is currently developing democratic and horizontal security systems for activists and powerless actors. Mariana holds a PhD in Architectural Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture from University College London (2019), and she is a Portuguese curator exploring critical, social and fictional dimensions of design for technological progress and ecological crises.

This fall, the project will also welcome Alfio Puglisi as Invited Assistant Professor. Alfio is Italian and holds a PhD in Political Economy from King’s College London (2021). He brings his knowledge on digital economy and currently is studying the interaction of political and economic systems of financial innovations in the area of DLT regarding collective decision making.

In the first semester of 2022, the team will be completed: Teresa Almeida, a Portuguese researcher currently living in Sweden, will join us as an Invited Associate Professor by January, and the Portuguese researcher David R. Matos will close the team joining by June as Invited Assistant Professor. With a rich background in Design, Teresa received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Newcastle University (2017), and she is an expert on interaction design. Last but not least, David – who holds a PhD in Computer Science from Técnico (2019) – will bring his expertise on distributed systems, cybersecurity and cloud computing.