Dr. Cristian Candia is an Associate Professor at the Data Science Institute, School of Engineering, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile, and Director of the Computational Research in Social Science Lab (CRiSS-LAB). He is also an External Faculty Member at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Northwestern University. From 2021 to 2024, he served as Director of the Master’s in Data Science at Universidad del Desarrollo.

Cristian is a computational social scientist and entrepreneur working at the intersection of human behavior, computational social science, network science, complex systems, and artificial intelligence. His research asks how people and groups remember, cooperate, form preferences, learn, and make decisions, and how these individual processes scale into collective outcomes.

A growing line of his work studies the relationship between AI and human heterogeneity: when computational models capture human judgments well, when they compress meaningful differences between people, and how preferences, systematic errors, and aggregation can be represented more faithfully. This complements his research on collective memory, political polarization, education, social networks, and decision-making.

He currently leads an ANID-FONDECYT Regular project on collective memory in science, focused on how retracted knowledge is forgotten or remains active over time. Previously, he led an ANID-FONDECYT Iniciación project on collective memory and attention in the arts and sciences. His work has also been supported by applied research and innovation initiatives including FONDEF and collaborations with public and private institutions.

Cristian earned his Ph.D. in Social Complexity Science from Universidad del Desarrollo. He carried out his entire doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab, where he developed his dissertation. His broader research training also includes the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University. He later completed a postdoctoral appointment in computational social science at Kellogg School of Management / NICO, Northwestern University (2019–2020). He also holds degrees in Physics and Engineering Physics from the Universidad de Concepción, Chile.

His work has received international recognition, including a Nature Editorial Recommendation, an Editor’s Suggestion in Physical Review Physics Education Research, and the Best Lightning Talk Award at the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS) 2025. He has also been invited as a keynote speaker at the Computational Social Science Satellite of CCS 2025 and as Invited Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Global School for Emerging Political Economies.

Cristian has led and contributed to data- and AI-based platforms including Lixandria, Discolab, PriorizaChile, DYNAMAP, and Capybara. These projects translate computational social science into tools for education, school coexistence, civic technology, organizational analysis, and decision support.