Guilherme Barros

Guilherme is a materials engineer turned statistician from São Paulo, Brazil. He graduated as a materials engineer from the University of São Paulo in 2014. After working for a few years in diverse fields ranging from agronomy and field experiments to chocolate manufacturing and sales, he decided to further consolidate his career changes and moved to Linköping, Sweden in September 2017 to study for a MSc in Statistics and Machine Learning.

His interest in the field of causality began when working in his master thesis under the supervision of José M. Peña, which explored how causal relationships and graphs can be extracted from observational data. After graduation from his masters studies in June 2019, he moved to Umeå to continue his dive into statistics by studying for a PhD degree..

During his PhD, he studied and developed methods for the intersection of fields between causal inference and survival analysis under the supervision of Jenny Häggström and Marie Eriksson. His work was focused on applications to observational data, especially related to national registers. He also collaborated with the Swedish Stroke Register (Riksstroke). He defended his doctoral thesis, Estimation of hazard ratios from observational data with applications related to stroke, in February 2024.

Currently, he works at Icelab at Umeå University in collaboration with Martin Rosvall, Anna Smed Sörensen (Karolinska Institute) and Johan Normark studying how methods from machine learning and causal inference can be used to further our understanding of infectious diseases, immunology and epigenetics.

Guilherme became a statistician due to his general interest in all fields, and he is always excited and curious to talk about other researcher’s ideas and work. He spends his free time playing chess, dancing, practicing the saxophone, taking pictures of northern lights, cooking, skiing, weightlifting, trying new foods and drinks, reading, and traveling.