Keynote Speakers
Dr. Aliakbar Akbaritabar
Title of Talk: "Mobility, Migration, and Collaboration of Scholars"
Aliakbar Akbaritabar is an incoming Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Rostock and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He was previously the Deputy Head for Training at the Department of Digital and Computational Demography at MPIDR and, before that, a postdoc at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies. He holds a PhD in economic sociology and labour studies from the University of Milan and a PhD in sociology from the Allameh Tabataba’i University of Tehran. His research focuses on science studies, migration of researchers and highly skilled populations, social networks, collaboration networks, and computational social science. He is a member of the core team of the Scholarly Migration Database, which was launched in 2023. Since 2021, he has been researching the use of bibliometric data for demographic and migration research at MPIDR. He is an affiliate member of the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies at the Humboldt‑Universität zu Berlin.
Dr. Rodrigo Costas Comesana
Title of Talk: "The Multiversatory of science: fostering diversity and inclusion in science by means of multi-perspective and participatory science observatories"
Rodrigo Costas is a senior researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University (the Netherlands). Rodrigo is also an Extraordinary Associate Professor at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) of Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from the CSIC in Spain. His areas of expertise include the fields of information science, scientometrics, and social media metrics. At CWTS he leads the research line in ‘altmetrics’, focused on developing new theoretical and analytical approaches to study the interactions between social media and science. Some of his other topics of research include the development of advanced scientometric studies of individual scholars and the study of funding acknowledgments as a new source of scientometric data. In addition to his research activities, Rodrigo is also involved in various European and contract research projects.
Dr. Giacomo Vaccario
Title of Talk: "Knowledge on the move: Reconstructing scientists' mobility network "
Giacomo Vaccario is a senior researcher at the Chair of Ecosystem Management, ETH Zurich, where he studies trade-offs in using wood for construction by analyzing supply chains at both Swiss and European levels. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher and earned a Doctorate in Science in 2019 at the Chair of System Design, ETH Zurich. His academic background includes completing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge and obtaining a Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from Sapienza University of Rome. His research focuses on understanding cooperation in socio-economic systems, particularly how firms and scientists collaborate to create knowledge. He explores the interplay between these collaborations and the knowledge generated, using statistical analysis of patent and publication data combined with agent-based models. Additionally, he has examined the limitations of network-based ranking methods and developed statistically principled approaches to assess ranking fairness.
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We look forward to your submissions and to advancing this important dialogue together!