Leonardo Castro-Gonzalez

About me

Leonardo obtained his PhD from the University of Birmingham studying how to make different security and cyber security systems more efficient from a behavioural perspective. These systems, among others, include the illicit-drug distribution method known as the County Lines Model in England. Before his PhD, he read Physics at UNAM – Mexico, and did his MSc in Complex Systems Modelling at King’s College London.

From September 2019 to October 2021, Leonardo was a visiting student at the Urban Analytics Programme at The Alan Turing institute. In May 2022, he came back to the Turing as a Research Assistant at the Shocks and Resilience project. When his PhD was awarded to him, he transitioned to a Research Associate (postdoc). In May 2023, he is expected to start working at the Policy Modelling Team of the Public Policy Programme.

Before joining the Policy Modelling Group, he worked at the Shocks and Resilience Project of the Alan Turing Institute, where he researched about the instability of political conversation in different social networks, particularly Twitter. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including Networks Science, Information Theory and Political Science Theory,

Leonardo’s research interests are complex systems (both theoretical and applied), computational social sciences, natural language processing, behavioural data science and heterodox economic models.

He also enjoys reading and researching about urban sciences, quantitative geography and history. His work is always complemented by philosophy and ethics of science.

Finally, he enjoys reading about conspiracy theories that have influenced the political or social behaviour of a given group of people. He has a particular interest in conspiracy theories involving aliens, although those seem more difficult to validate.

Projects

Publications

Contact me

lmcastrogonzalez@turing.ac.uk
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