The 12th edition of the School on Methods Winter Edition will take place from July 28 to August 1, 2025, at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay in Montevideo, Uruguay. Courses starting in the first week (July 1) are asynchronous, and those from July 28 to August 1 are face-to-face.
The School offers introductory and methodological courses. The introductory courses are R, PYTHON, and R for spatial analysis. The methodological courses cover various quantitative and qualitative research methods, research designs, and techniques for data collection and measurement, combining theoretical and hands-on (lab) sessions. Courses are taught in Spanish.
The School offers a unique opportunity to get in touch with an interesting group of instructors, social scientists, and professionals from diverse areas and varied countries.
List of instructors, 2025 edition:
Mateo Villamizar
PhD in Political Science from Duke University.
He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and the Universidad Católica de Uruguay and a research associate at DevLab@Penn in the Machine Learning for Peace Project. His research has been funded by Innovations for Poverty Action, USAID, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, Universidad Católica del Uruguay, and Duke University.
His research explores the relationship between migration, inequality, and political participation in Latin America.
Natalia Garbiras-Díaz
Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
She is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit at Harvard Business School and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California. Before joining HBS, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. Before her Ph.D., she worked at the World Bank, the Democracy Observatory, and the Colombian National Planning Department.
Her main research interests are in comparative politics and the political economy of development, focusing on corruption, public goods provision, and accountability in Latin America. She also studies the formation of citizen and ex-combatant attitudes and their role in stabilizing peace in post-conflict settings.
Gustavo Vázquez
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universidad Nacional del Sur.
He completed his postdoctoral research at the Chemical Engineering Pilot Plant (CONICET) between 2003 and 2005 and joined CONICET (Argentina) as a Researcher in 2005. In 2014, he joined UCU as an Associate Professor, and since 2019, he has served as a Full Professor. He is a member of the National System of Researchers and the Pedeciba Informatics program. Currently, he is the Director of the Department of Informatics at UCU.
His research covers various topics, including developing new descriptors that capture underlying information, missing value imputation methods, and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Currently, he is developing a research line focused on the distributed representation of knowledge based on hypervectors.
Mauricio Velasco
Ph.D. in Mathematics from Cornell University.
He completed his postdoctoral research in the Department of Mathematics at UC Berkeley (USA). He worked as an associate in the financial derivatives analysis group at Goldman Sachs International in London. He has also been a visiting professor at UdelaR and the IMT in Toulouse (France).
His research area is algebraic geometry and its applications. His work focuses on developing algebraic methods to solve problems in optimization, statistics, and machine learning.
Naim Bro
Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Cambridge.
He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Santigo, Chile, and a researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data.
His main research areas combine political elites, stratification and computational social science.
Marcos Cardozo
PhD. In Economics from Indiana University.
He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mitch Daniels School of Business at Purdue University, conducting experiments in monetary economics. Since 2024, he has been an Assistant Professor at Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
His research specializes in Behavioral and Experimental Economics. A unifying theme in his work is the study of coordination among agents when information is incomplete. He has applied this to new mechanisms for funding public goods in microeconomic models and to competition between international currencies in macroeconomic monetary models.
José Rivero
PhD. in Economic Sciences from CY Cergy Paris Université.
He worked in the private sector as a consultant in Economics and Finance between 2010 and 2013 and in the public sector as an economist at the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Uruguay in 2015. He then transitioned to the academic sector, working as a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Economics at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de la República, from 2015 to 2023. He is a member of the Business and Administration Department at Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
His current areas of expertise are Behavioral Economics and Experimental Economics. He is particularly interested in exploring how pro-social motivations, beyond purely monetary ones, affect economic agents' decision-making in asymmetric information contexts. To address this, he combines theoretical models (primarily drawing on concepts from game theory) and laboratory experiments.
Inés Fynn
Ph.D. in Political Science from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at Universidad Católica del Uruguay and the Director of the Master's Degree in Public Policy and Public Administration. She is a member of the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data and the Millennium Institute for Violence and Democracy (VIODEMOS). She was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship from ANID-Chile and served as a visiting GPD Fellow at Brown University during the fall of 2019.
Her primary research areas are organized crime and the informal provision of welfare. In the field of organized crime, she examines how criminal organizations influence relationships between citizens and the state, exploring the mechanisms behind citizens' silence agreements with drug trafficking gangs. She also investigates how and why criminal governance emerges in contexts where the state is present. In her research on the informal provision of welfare, Fynn delves into non-state social protection mechanisms in Latin America, aiming to explain the variation in types and distribution of informal welfare provision from a political economy perspective, highlighting how political actors use it for mobilization and political engagement.
Juan Pablo Viteri
PhD. in Economics from Empresa de la Universidad Icesi.
He is currently a member of the scientific committee of Estudios Gerenciales, a journal of management and economics. He served as the journal's Editorial Director until July 2023, when it improved its ranking from Q4 to Q3 in Scopus. He was affiliated with Universidad Icesi as a researcher and faculty member from August 2016 to July 2023.
His research focuses on applying business and financial analytics to address issues related to energy and sustainability. He is particularly interested in understanding the effects of new technologies, such as renewable energy, on electricity markets and analyzing the optimal allocation of these technologies in energy portfolios. Additionally, he has focused on examining the complementarity between renewable resources at different geographical and temporal scales and their potential to diversify energy portfolios.
Rafael Piñeiro
Ph.D. in Political Science from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
He has been a Full Professor of Political Science at the Department of Social Sciences at UCU since 2023. He was a member of the Latin American Political Science Association (ALACIP) executive committee for the 2019-2024 period. He is also a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network.
His primary research focuses on political party organizations and activism and the political incorporation of popular sectors in Latin America.
Martín Opertti
Political Science PhD Student at Duke University.
He previously worked as a Research Assistant and Instructor at Unidad de Métodos y Acceso a Datos (FCS-UdelaR, Uruguay), an Instructor at Universidad Católica de Uruguay, and a Data Scientist at Verasight.
His main research interest is the dynamics and consequences of political identities, mainly how they influence information processing and non-political behavior.
Ornella Novino
Senior Data Analyst at Marco. She previously worked as a Fraud Detection Data Analyst at The Sandbox. Specialist in SQL, Markdown, Python, RMarkdown, R, and Batch languages. BA. in Political Sciences, UCU.
Cecilia Giambruno
Msc. is a Consultant in Educational Digital Transformation in the Education Division of the Inter-American Development Bank. She has a Master's degree in Public Policy and a degree in Sociology from the Universidad Católica del Uruguay.
Additional information
The number of participants per course is limited, so we recommend making early applications. Attending a course in the morning and another in the afternoon is possible. However, applicants must pay special attention to the tasks and exercises required outside class time. It is also important to pay attention to the "course requirements" before applying, which are clearly expressed in the descriptions of each course.
Important (for credit revalidation): Students interested in obtaining a diploma of course approval must take an external examination that will be evaluated by the respective instructors after the School ends. To request this option, students must first communicate with the School (eim@ucu.edu.uy) before the beginning of the course.
The School does not provide accommodation or travel aid. Travels to the city of Montevideo and accommodation are the responsibility of each participant. In addition to the courses, the School organizes academic and recreational activities during and at the end of the school days. The dynamic combines seminars on research topics of special interest with spaces for recreation to enjoy the cultural life of Montevideo.
For inquiries about courses and applications to:
Organization Committee of the School on Methods