I’m João (John), an Assistant Professor at ISPA with a PhD in social psychology from the University of Lisbon.
During my PhD, much of my research focused on how adults perceive children as a social category. Along the way I became increasingly interested in connecting philosophy of science with research methods, statistics, and data analysis. I actively bring those ideas together in my research, teaching, and consulting work.
I like thinking about what makes a good research question, what would count as convincing evidence, which analysis actually answers the question, and how sure or humble we should be about the conclusions we draw. That carries forward into my research, teaching, and consulting work.
I teach statistics, research methods, philosophy of science, and R. I also work on quantitative research problems, especially when the difficult part is figuring out what analysis makes sense, how to turn a messy question into something tractable, or how to make the whole process easier to inspect and reproduce. I develop open-source software to help researchers build more reproducible and open research workflows.
I also like computers rather more than is probably necessary. I use Linux, enjoy programming and learning about computer science, and spend a fair amount of time building or maintaining small tools for research, teaching, and whatever technical problem has caught my attention that week.
More detail is available in my CV and under Projects.
Away from work, I have assorted hobbies that get me away from the computer, and I enjoy spending time with my wife and son.