Fernando Chirigati

Fernando Chirigati

Chief Editor
Nature Computational Science

About Me

Currently, I’m the chief editor at Nature Computational Science, a journal that focuses on fundamental and applied research related to computational methods, algorithms, and tools that are developed across a range of scientific disciplines to help solve challenging, real-world problems.

Before, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, under the supervision of Prof. Juliana Freire. I came to the beautiful - and very busy - city of New York in January 2012 to pursue a Ph.D. degree. Before coming to New York, I worked as a Research Assistant at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), under the supervision of Prof. Marta Mattoso. I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from NYU, and a B.E. in Computer and Information Engineering from UFRJ. To check out my full CV, click here.

I come from the gorgeous city of Petrópolis, in Brazil, where almost all my family and friends still reside. I had the opportunity to study in Rio de Janeiro, the “Marvelous City,” where I not only made a lot of good friends, but also started working with research in the database area.

Research

Throughout the course of my Ph.D. and Postdoc, my research focus was mainly in the area of scientific data management, including provenance management and analytics, large-scale data analytics, data science, data mining, reproducibility, and data visualization.

Some of the projects I’ve worked on in the past are:

  • Streamlining Model Design, Comparison, and Curation: Developing automated model discovery systems that enable users with subject matter expertise but no data science background to create empirical models of real, complex processes.
  • Reproducibility in Science: Infrastructure to facilitate the creation, reuse, and sharing of reproducible computational experiments (e.g.: ReproZip, noWorkflow).
  • Urban Data Management and Analytics: Understanding the urban environment by efficiently analyzing the numerous interactions among large spatio-temporal urban data (e.g.: Data Polygamy).
  • Saving Data Journalism: Developing a prototype to enable systematic collection and preservation of dynamic news websites.

I was also Reproducibility Editor for the Information Systems Journal, Elsevier North-Holland.

Please refer to my list of publications and professional activities for more details.

Awards and Honors

  • 10 out of 200 Series, the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum
  • Invitation to the 7th Heidelberg Laureate Forum: Only the 200 most qualified young researchers are given the opportunity to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an event where young researchers can personally meet the winners of the most prestigious prizes in Computer Science and Mathematics.
  • Honorable Mention, SIGMOD 2017 Best Demonstration Award: our demo Querying and Exploring Polygamous Relationships in Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets received an honorable mention (8 out of 31 demos).
  • SIGMOD 2017 Most Reproducible Paper Award: our paper Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships among Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets was selected as one of the most reproducible papers across several criteria of the SIGMOD 2016 papers.
  • SIGMOD 2017 Student Travel Award
  • Pearl Brownstein Doctoral Research Award: Doctoral research that shows the greatest promise, given by NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in 2016.
  • 2nd Place in the SIGMOD 2014 Programming Contest: Our team - ViDA team, together with Tuan-Anh Hoang-Vu, Kien Pham, and Huy T. Vo - got 2nd place out of 91 teams, given by SIGMOD, in 2014.
  • Deborah Rosenthal, MD Award: Outstanding performance on the Ph.D. qualifying examination, given by NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in 2014.
  • A3P Special Honor: Outstanding performance achieved at the Polytechnic School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, given by the Alumni Association of the Polytechnic School (A3P) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in 2013.
  • Magna Cum Laude Honor: Outstanding performance achieved in Computer and Information Engineering, given by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in 2013.
  • Research Honor: Given by the Academic Deliberative Council of the Graduate Department of Engineering (COPPE) at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2010.
  • Best Poster Award: Desenvolvimento de Estruturas de Controle Explícito para o SGWfC VisTrails, XXIV Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD), in 2009.
  • Honorable Mention: TOP10 presentation among more than 500 presentations in the XXXI Conference on Young Research Assistant, at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2009.