Chris Monterola

Current Positions

National Academy of Science and Technology, Philippines (June 2020 - present)


Other Active Positions

Previous Positions

Biography

Chris is a physicist and machine learning scientist, educator, entrepreneur, and technology advisor for various enterprises and organizations. He sits on the board of Xurpas, Inc. (PSE:X), a publicly listed technology company that has offered innovative IT products and services for the past twenty years. Dr. Monterola is also a NAST Academician who holds an Aboitiz Chair in Data Science and a Professorship at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). He is also AIM's Head of the Aboitiz School of Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (ASITE). ASITE is the newest of the four AIM schools that house four academic programs: MS in Data Science, Masters in Innovation and Business, Masters in Entrepreneurship, and PhD in Data Science. Under ASITE is also an advanced analytics industry-facing research lab—the Analytics, Computing, and Complex Systems (ACCeSs) lab, where he is the Executive Managing Director. To date, Chris has mentored over 200 data scientists across different private and public sectors. 

Before AIM

Before joining AIM, Dr. Monterola was a Senior Scientist at the Institute of High-Performance Computing in the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR) — Singapore’s lead government agency for fostering world-class scientific research. He was the Capability Group Manager (CGM) of the Complex Systems (CxSy) Capability Group at the IHPC. Chris was also the Principal Investigator and Scientific Director of the Complexity Science Programme (CSP) of the IHPC under the CxSy. The CSP was one of the programs under a bigger umbrella, the A*STAR Urban Systems Initiative. Prior to his stint in Singapore, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of  Complex Systems. He obtained a Ph.D. in Physics in 2002 from the National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD), where he was an Associate Professor 7. He was also the Coordinator of the Instrumentation Physics Laboratory (IPL), a leading physics research group in the Philippines.

Aside from teaching at UPD, he also mentored and advised physics students (14 MS, 9 PhDs) on their research theses/dissertations. To date, he has advised/co-advised more than 100 students who have already successfully obtained various academic degrees. In 2023, he was the primary adviser of the first PhD in Data Science graduates in the Philippines and among the first in ASEAN. In 2008 and 2011 respectively, Chris received the Achievement award from the National Research Council of the Philippines (NRCP) and the Outstanding Young Scientist Award (OYS) from the DOST National Academy of Science and Technology because of his significant contributions to science and technology in the country. Also, in 2011, he was given the top prize in NAST's Talent Search for Young Scientist Award

In 2009, the SEA-EU-NET  organized a mapping study of excellent researchers from the ASEAN member countries with the objective of raising "awareness for the existence of high-quality research" and presenting "a pool of excellent researchers in Southeast Asia." It featured Chris as one of the very few excellent researchers in the region.

Research

His current research activities revolve around Machine Learning, Complex Systems, Deep Learning, Algorithmic Auditing, Computational Physics, Complex Networks, and General Forecasting. His previous research focused on the following fields: Landslide and Granular Dynamics, Biological Physics, Social Networks, Physics Education, Network Science, Public Opinion Research, Game Theory, Olfactory Systems, and Econophysics. The image below qualitatively shows the frequency distribution of the top 100 words used across all the abstracts of his publications in ISI-indexed journals. The word cloud was generated using Wordle.

Awards


Most Recent Scientific Publications

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Past and Upcoming Event(s)