I am a senior lecturer at the University of Southampton in the Department of Politics and International Relations and an associate external professor at the School of Collective Intelligence in Rabat.

At Southampton, I founded the Centre for Behavioural Experimental Action and Research (C-BEAR), and I am a member of the Centre for Democratic Futures (CdF).

My research explores the diffusion and impact of governance and social innovations aimed at deepening democracy in Public Administration, Parties, and Organizations (Democratic Innovations). For a list of publications here is my google scholar page.

I began working on Participatory Budgeting in Brazil and Minipublics in North America in the mid-2000s and subsequently explored a wide variety of other participatory and deliberative processes. Since 2012, half of my work has focused on e-deliberation, e-PB platforms, and hybrid innovations that integrate online and offline channels of participation, playful design, argument mapping, and AI.

One of my specialties is impact evaluation. Combining large surveys, field experiments, quantitative and qualitative analysis in a comparative perspective, I have evaluated cases ranging from Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the United States.

My most recent research focuses on injecting Codesign to augment democratic innovations (see Phoenix project), regional laws to promote democratic innovations, Role Playing Games to teach democratic skills, argument mapping, and a return to the study of the diffusion of democratic innovations with a new Census of PB in Brazil (2024) and a parallel project in the UK.