J. G. Oliveira, PhD in Physics, 2008, supervised by J. F. F. Mendes (University of Aveiro, Portugal) and by A.-L. Barabási (University of Notre Dame, USA). I have been a Physics Assistant Professor at the University of Porto. I have also been a postdoc at the University of Aveiro, worked as Research Assistant at the Social Physics and Complexity Lab (LIP, Lisbon) and as Complex Systems Specialist at the Data Science Knowledge Center (Nova SBE, Cascais).
I used to be a clarinetist, I am an occasional volunteer, nature lover, and advocate for justice for those in need. As a researcher, I first fell in love with a sandpile in the field of granular materials. After that, understanding the structure, dynamics and complexity of systems — wether physical, biological, or social, among many others — that must be represented as networks has been the main scope of my research, combining theoretical methods (computational and analytical) and empirical techniques (data collection, analysis, and modeling), prioritizing ethical conduct, and aiming to comprehend phenomena such as phase transitions in the structure of networks, the emergence of epidemics, or the synchronization of oscillators, by drawing on methods from graph theory, statistical mechanics, or data mining. I am also interested in statistical physics from the fundamental point, and mathematics therein, including chaos and dynamical systems.
