Roger Guimerà

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Roger Guimerà (Barcelona, 1976) graduated in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1998, and obtained a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Rovira i Virgili in 2003. He then moved to Northwestern University where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow and, later, as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008 he became a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern's Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, before accepting his current position at ICREA in 2010. He has been awarded the Premi Nacional de Recerca al Talent Jove (2010), the Erdös-Rényi Prize in Network Science (2012), and the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics (2014).


Research interests

Cells, ecosystems and economies are examples of complex systems. In complex systems, individual components interact with each other, usually in nonlinear ways, giving rise to complex networks of interactions that are neither totally regular nor totally random. Partly because of the interactions themselves and partly because of the interaction’s topology, complex systems cannot be properly understood by just analyzing their constituent parts. This feature of complex systems poses important challenges from both a fundamental perspective and an engineering perspective. Roger’s research is devoted to the study of complex systems and, particularly, of the structure of complex networks and the interplay between network structure and dynamics. During his career, he has: (i) made methodological contributions to the study of complex networks, and (ii) used complex network analysis to gain understanding on a number of systems.

Selected publications

– Valles-Catala T, Peixoto TP, Sales-Pardo M & Guimera R 2018, ‘Consistencies and inconsistencies between model selection and link prediction in networks‘, Phys. Rev. E 97 , 062316.

– Cobo-López S, Godoy-Lorite A, Duch J, Sales-Pardo M & Guimerà R 2018, ‘Optimal prediction of decisions and model selection in social dilemmas using block models‘, EPJ Data Sci. 7, 48.

– Garcia-Algar M, Fernandez-Carrascal A, Olano-Daza A, Guerrini L, Feliu N, Parak WJ, Guimera R, Eduardo Garcia-Rico E & Alvarez-Puebla RA 2018, ‘Adaptive metabolic pattern biomarker for disease monitoring and staging of lung cancer with liquid biopsy’, NPJ Precision Oncology 2 , art. no. 16.

– Uroz M, Wistorf S, Serra-Picamal X, Conte V, Sales-Pardo M, Roca-Cusachs P, Guimera RTrepat X 2018, ‘Regulation of cell cycle progression by cell–cell and cell–matrix forces‘, Nat. Cell Biol. 20 , 646 -654.


Selected research activities

Principal investigator:

– “Mecánica Estadística para el Modelado y la Predicción del Comportamiento Humano”, (MINECO), 1 Jan 2017 – 31 Dec 2019

Invited courses and lectures:

– 4th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science, Evanston, IL, USA

– Centre for Process Systems Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK

Conference organization:

– Program committee member of NetSci’18 and SIAMNS’18

Editorship:

– PLoS ONE

– Frontiers in Genetics

Synergistic activities:

– Vice president of the Catalan Network for the Study of Complex Systems “complexitat.cat”