Peter Gerbrands is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the of Utrecht University School of Economics, where is develops the data infrastructure for FIRMBACKBONE. He teaches data science courses: “Applied Data Analysis and Visualization” and “Introduction to R”. His research interests are agent-based simulations, social network analysis, complex systems, big data analysis, statistical learning, and computational social science. He applies his skills primarily for policy analysis, especially related to illicit financial flows, i.e. tax evasion, tax avoidance and money laundering and has published in Regulation & Governance, and EPJ Data Science. Prior to becoming an academic, Peter had a long career in IT consulting. In Fall 2023, he is a Visiting Research Scholar at SUNY Binghamton in NY.

I’m a Research Associate in Computational Social Science at Durham University working on a project that intends to produce more realistic artificial social networks (RASN) for simulation by creating a taxonomy of existing generator papers, accessible as an interactive, open-access database, in addition to exploring the interdependencies of social network’s structural properties. I obtained my PhD from University of Glasgow in (2023) where I was working on modelling national identity polarisation on social media platforms using ABMs.

I hold a MA in Prehistory and a master degree in International Relations, both obtained at the Sapienza University of Rome. After this I obtained a PhD in Pre- and Protohistory and Aegean Archaeology from the University of Heidelberg in cotutelle de thèse with the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne Panthéon. Since 2018 I hold a permanent position as senior researcher at the Italian National Research Council. Prior to this I had worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr University of Bochum, University of Heidelberg, University of Amsterdam and University of Mainz.