Mikaela Fudolig
Field
Location (during time of takeover)
Featured on March 27, 2023
To round off March and International Women’s Month, we’re joined by Dr. Mikaela Fudolig—physicist and computational social scientist currently based at the University of Vermont.
In 2002, Mikaela participated in an experimental program for early college entrants at the University of the Philippines Diliman—taking 31 units of college courses with only 1 year of high school studies. By 2007, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics, as a summa cum laude and valedictorian at the age of 16.
Mikaela later worked as an instructor at UP Diliman while finishing up her Master of Science, and eventually, Doctor of Philosophy in Physics. Her doctoral dissertation was titled, “Analytic treatment of consensus achievement in two-level opinion dynamics models of completely connected agents with single-type zealots.”
After stints as an R&D specialist at the Energy Development Corporation, Assistant Professor at the Ateneo de Manila University, and postdoctoral researcher at the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, today Mikaela is a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont under Profs Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds.
While her academic background is in physics, her research now aligns with computational social science, a highly interdisciplinary field that uses quantitative approaches on (usually big) data to understand human behavior. She has worked on a wide variety of topics, including mobile communication, migration, social media, books, music, and wellness. The methods she has used are similarly broad in scope, and include those from machine learning, network science, and signal processing.
Here are some fun facts about Mikaela:
- For the longest time, she thought she didn’t like sports. It turns out all the sports she liked were winter sports, which she only started to do after going abroad.
- Fall is her favorite season, and winter is a close second. She’s not the biggest fan of spring and summer.
- She finds baking fun!
