The researcher has a long career in research data management and data science at the prestigious Harvard University (USA).
The researcher Mercè Crosas has joined the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) team to lead the new Computational Social Sciences programme, with the aim of promoting research in this field by harnessing the potential of supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis.
Crosas has a long career at Harvard University in the United States, where she was head of research data management and head of the office of data science and technology at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
With a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona, a PhD in Astrophysics from Rice University and a predoctoral and postdoctoral degree from Harvard University's Center for Astrophysics, Crosas closed a 32-year period in the US to take up the position of Secretary for Open Government at the Generalitat de Catalunya between 2021 and 2023.
The BSC's newly created Computational Social Sciences programme, a pioneering initiative in an European supercomputing centre, works to find new applications of data and supercomputing in social science research, including the fields of economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, geography, psychology and cognitive science, and in the digital humanities (an area of research where computing and the humanities converge, applied to fields such as history, literature, linguistics, archaeology and cultural heritage).