People

Mentoring is one of the parts of my job I take most seriously, and watching a tentative first-year student turn into an independent researcher remains one of the most rewarding things I get to witness. The list below covers people who’ve worked in the group as PhD students or postdocs since 2010 — collaborators in the most literal sense. Master’s students, who are equally a big part of the group’s life, are tucked one click away because there are simply too many of them for a single page.

By the numbers

As of 2026-05-04.

13 PhD students as main supervisor (plus 13 more as co-supervisor)
14 postdocs (4 ongoing, 10 former)
170 Master’s projects
Nominated for best PhD advisor at DTU

PhD students

The thirteen PhDs where I served as the primary advisor, reverse-chronological by start.

2026–present — Lasse Hyldig Hansen — Industrial PhD with the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority. Accelerated Digital Consumption and Adolescent Psychological Trajectories.
2025–present — Viktor Stenby Johansson — Industrial PhD with Vipps MobilePay. Understanding Behavior in Massive Social Networks using Embedding Methods.
2024–present — Christian Vestergaard Djurhuus — University of Copenhagen / Pioneer Centre for AI. Modelling human life trajectories from registry data using graph representation learning.
2021–2026 — Lasse Mohr Mikkelsen — Origins of Structure in Social Networks.
2021–2025 — Louis Boucherie — Geometry & Geography of Complex Networks.
2020–2024 — Peter Edsberg Møllgaard — Modelling Large Scale Behavioral Data: Role of External Environments.
2020–2024 — Germans Savcisens — Life Trajectories as Symbolic Language. (life2vec.)
2018–2022 — Kelton Ray Minor — Planetary Social and Behavioral Data Science. (UCPH/SODAS.) Now postdoc at Columbia’s Data Science Institute.
2018–2021 — Sigriður Svala Jónasdóttir — Global and large-scale study of complex patterns in high-resolution sleep activity data.
2016–2019 — Ulf Aslak Lai — Complexity in Social Data. (UCPH/SODAS.)
2016–2019 — Bjarke Mørch Mønsted — Social Spreading in Complex Networks.
2013–2016 — Piotr Sapieżyński — From Raw Data to Social Systems: Separating the Signal from the Noise in Smartphone Sensor Measurements.
2012–2015 — Vedran Sekara — Dynamics of High-Resolution Networks.

Postdocs

Current

Lasse Mohr Mikkelsen — continuing into a postdoc straight after his DTU defence.
Louis Boucherie — DTU Compute and SODAS. Also guest researcher at Statistics Denmark and co-founder of mirand.ai.
Abbas Karimi Rizi — DTU Compute, visiting at SODAS. Works on epidemic and spreading dynamics on complex networks.
Michele Tizzani — complex networks, epidemics, and computational social science.

Former

Jonas Lybker Juul — Carlsberg Foundation Fellow at DTU after a postdoc at Cornell with Strogatz, Kleinberg, and Benson. Now Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen.
Anna Sapienza — came from USC’s Information Sciences Institute. After DTU: postdoc at SODAS (2020–2023). Now Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation, Turin, and Assistant Professor at the University of Eastern Piedmont.
Ulf Aslak Lai — continued briefly into a postdoc after defending. After academia: data scientist at Precis Digital; now an independent consultant via PyMC Labs, focusing on Bayesian marketing-mix modelling and generative AI.
Laura Alessandretti — joined after a PhD at City, University of London. Now Associate Professor in the Section for Cognitive Systems at DTU Compute, and co-advisor on several of my later students.
Piotr Sapieżyński — continued into a postdoc after his DTU PhD. Now Assistant Research Professor at Northeastern’s Khoury College (Internet Democracy Initiative), with a continuing affiliation at DTU.
Benjamin F. Maier — theoretical physicist who’s worked across academia and industry (Robert Koch Institute, Santa Fe Institute, PyMC Labs, Deutsche Bank). Now an independent consultant.
Josefine Bohr Brask — animal-behaviour background (Exeter, UCPH). Now Assistant Professor at SODAS, University of Copenhagen.
Enys Mones — now Lead Data Scientist at CodeScene.
Jorge Leitão — co-advised with Henrik Palmer Olsen as main advisor.
Arkadiusz Stopczynski — one of the earliest postdocs in the group; later went on to Google as a Data Scientist. Has continued to serve as examiner on several DTU PhDs since.

Where everyone has gone

A non-trivial share of former PhDs and postdocs hold faculty positions: Vedran Sekara at the IT University of Copenhagen, Piotr Sapieżyński at Northeastern, Laura Alessandretti at DTU Compute, Anna Sapienza at the ISI Foundation and the University of Eastern Piedmont, Jonas Lybker Juul at the IT University of Copenhagen, and Josefine Bohr Brask at SODAS. Several others are in early-career academic posts — Germans Savcisens as Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern, with Louis Boucherie and Lasse Mohr Mikkelsen continuing as postdocs at DTU after their defences.

Beyond academia, supervisees have moved into manager-level roles at Google and Waymo, data-science positions at UNICEF, Danmarks Nationalbank, PFA Pension, and Vipps MobilePay, founder/operator roles at startups (e.g. Peergrade), independent consulting in Bayesian modelling and generative AI, and public-sector analytics including at the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority. The list keeps growing in directions I never could have predicted, and that’s much of the fun.