Joana Gonçalves de Sá is a researcher at LIP, where she coordinates the Social Physics and Complexity (SPAC) research group. Since 2025, she is also an Invited Associate Professor at NOVA LINCS and External Faculty at the Complexity Sciences Hub, in Vienna. She has a degree in Physics Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico – University of Lisbon, and a PhD in Systems Biology from NOVA – ITQB, having developed her thesis at Harvard University, USA. Her current research uses data analytics and machine learning to study complex problems at the interface between Biomedicine, Social Sciences, and Computation, with a large ethical and societal focus.
From 2018 to 2020, she was an Associated Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics and, before that, a Principal Investigator at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, where she also coordinated the Science for Society Initiative and was the founder and Director of the Graduate Program Science for Development (PGCD), aiming at improving scientific research in Africa.
She received two ERC grants (Stg_2019 and PoC_2022) to study human and algorithmic biases using fake news as a model system.
