Rafael Geurgas, PhD
Postdoctoral Scholar
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Rafael Geurgas is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociogenomics Initiative at Purdue University’s Department of Sociology. With a background in physics and experience with machine learning, his work focuses on predicting and understanding mental health outcomes using genomic and environmental data. He is originally from Brazil, where he completed his master's and PhD in Physics at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). Rafael integrates state-of-the-art computational methods and sociological theory to better understand complex social phenomena.
Publications
Geurgas, R., Newman, S. J., Akimova, E. T., Thompson, K. N., & Wedow, R. (2025). What machine learning teaches us about depression prediction across the life course: An exploratory comparison of predictive models. Social Science and Medicine – Population Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101886
Geurgas, R., & Tessler, L. R. (2024). Automatic detection of fake tweets about the COVID-19 vaccine in Portuguese. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-024-01216-x
Geurgas, R., & Tessler, L. R. (2024). Mapping Anti-vaccine activism: Semantic similarity to access disinformation communities in Twitter (X) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Thompson, K. N., Couvy-Duchesne, B., Geurgas, R., Newman, S., Sheppard, L., Wedow, R., & Tropf, F. C. (2024, July 23). Drawing parallels across complex trait genomics and social science to combine environmental and genetic risk factors for depression in a longitudinal US cohort. OSF. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/AKZHD
Geurgas, R. (2023). Deep learning to detect disinformation communities by semantic similarity in Twitter. Universidade de Campinas- Unicamp. Master Dissertation.
Geurgas, R. (2019). Procura por assinaturas de alinhamento induzido por campo magnético nas direções de chegada de raio