Cristina Metgher

Short Bio

Hi everyone. Originally I am from Moldova (an Eastern European Country), though I have lived and worked both in Netherlands and Germany before coming to US. At this point I am based in Fairfax, Virginia. I am a PhD student in Computational Social Science at Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University.

I earned my bachelor and master degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Moldova. Before coming to US for my PhD, I worked for Technosoft (a software development company). Throughout my previous studies I focused and accomplished projects in the fields of natural language processing, web crawling, decision making. My academic supervisors are Robert Axtell and Maksim Tsvetovat.

Goals related to CSSS

I am very excited about the modules and the whole idea of changing the environment for 3 weeks. I do hope to meet interesting people, and after taking a quick look at the list of participants I concluded we would have some diversity there. I am interested in building agent based models of high relevance that would drive science forward and that would help people better understand and analyze things. My latest interests include computational neurology, social networks, modeling social phenomena and policy. Till recently, I have used NetLogo as main modeling tool, though I believe MASON is somehow more applicable to the types of models I’m interested in building, so I intend to work with it more. What I hope to take out of the CSSS is a deep understanding of conducting inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research on my areas of interest (this mostly because my areas of interest are so many!)

Personal

I am addicted to Argentine Tango. Whenever I am not in my lab, you can find me studying/dancing this amazing dance. I am also a great fan of outdoor activities; I enjoy biking (a lot), hiking, walking, running, camping etc. I am also learning to swim, I know, but better late than never. I am fluent in Romanian, Russian, English, and I speak some German too. I did some volunteering also, at AIESEC and MEDIAPOINT. You can also find me on Facebook, but when adding, please mention SFI or CSSS.

Hope to see all of you soon, and I am confident this will be a good learning experience for us and a great opportunity to meet amazingly interesting people from very diverse research areas.