Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Invited Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa and the leader of the Social Physics and Complexity (SPAC) research group at LIP. Before that, she was an Associate Professor at Nova SBE and a Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), where she remains as the Director of the Graduate Program Science for Development (PGCD), aiming at improving science in Africa. Her current research uses data analytics and machine learning to study complex problems at the interface between Biomedicine, Computation, Policy, Social Sciences, and Mathematics. These include epidemiology, critical thinking, network dynamics, political discourse, and their applications to human-behavior, with a large ethical and societal focus. Joana 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. In 2019, she was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behavior using the online spread of “fake news” as a model system.
Scientist: Joana Gonçalves de Sá
Quality information given by experts is like a vaccine against falsehoods
Scientists and experts should be available to communicate with the media, or their spot will be taken by false experts. But providing more information to the audience can also have a negative side effect: overconfidence.
Joana Gonçalves de Sá: “Mitigate the misinformation pandemic by ‘vaccinating’ the susceptible individuals first.”
Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Invited Associate Professor at the Physics Department of Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and was the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant to study human behaviour using the online spread of ’fake news’ as a model system. Disinformation and misinformation are not a new problem, so why did ...