Francisco Correia dos Santos
Francisco C. Santos is Vice-Rector at the University of Lisbon, Full Professor at Instituto Superior
Técnico (IST), and
researcher at INESC-ID. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where he was a Marie Curie Fellow at IRIDIA and later a Senior Researcher in the Machine Learning Group.
He studies how collective dynamics and social networks shape the way we cooperate, build trust, and organize our societies. Bridging artificial intelligence, biology, economics, and physics, he explores questions such as: Why do we help each other? How do social norms evolve? What enables institutions to form and endure? Or how does technology reshape these processes? His research on complex systems has also led him into other fields, from urban dynamics and early modern history to robotics, machine learning, cancer ecology, and particle physics.
His work has appeared in journals such as Nature, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, Proc. Royal Society B, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, and Nature Communications, among others, as well as in computer science conferences such as AAAI, AAMAS, and IJCAI. He ranks among the top 2% of the most cited scientists worldwide.
From 2022 to 2025, he served as Vice-President of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), leading national funding and policy initiatives in research careers, research and innovation, advanced training, and digital infrastructures and services.
He has received distinctions such as the Young Scientist Award for Socio-Econophysics (German Physical Society), the CGD / University of Lisbon Prize in Computer Science, and the Blue Sky Paper Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. As a professor, he received the 2022 IST Outstanding Teaching Award from IST's Pedagogical Council, as well as Excellence in Teaching Awards every year he has taught.
He has also co-led the Group of Artificial Intelligence for People and Society (GAIPS/INESC-ID), the interdisciplinary ATP group, and IST's PhD Program in Computer Science, co-founded IST's MSc in Data Science and Engineering, and served as Director of IST's Kindergarten, among other institutional roles.
For further information, please check the links above (publications, teaching, etc.) or visit his Google Scholar profile.
contact information
email : franciscocsantos[ at ]reitoria.ulisboa.pt or franciscocsantos[ at ]tecnico.ulisboa.pt
address:
Alameda da Universidade
1649-004 Lisboa
Portugal
T. +351 210 113 400 | +351 210 113 406
