Roberto is Co-Founder of the Centre for the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge and an elected Executive Committee member of the World Values Survey. His research examines public opinion, governance, and the use of novel data sources to address public policy challenges. He is also interested in political methodology, including comparative survey work, index construction and design, geospatial analysis, data harmonisation, and the synthesis of data from search and social media with classical survey-based approaches. His academic work has been published in a wide range of top-tier journals and cited in publications including The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Atlantic.
He graduated from the University of Oxford in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (BA) and completed his Ph.D. at the Harvard University Department of Government. He has previously served as a Peter Martin Fellow at the Financial Times, worked for the World Bank as designer of the Indices of Social Development, served as founding president of the Washington European Society, and acted as Principal Investigator of the World Values Survey in Rwanda (2007), Uzbekistan (2012), Indonesia (2017), and Bangladesh (2018).
