Rodrigo Weber dos Santos is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), where he joined in 2004 and founded the Computational Physiology Laboratory, a national reference in computational modeling of the heart. He has a strong international profile, having published more than 200 articles in high-impact journals such as Circulation and PNAS, with over 4,000 citations. He serves as editor and reviewer for international journals and has organized, since 2008, the Workshop on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges at the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS).
He was co-founder and coordinator (2006–2009) of UFJF’s Graduate Program in Computational Modeling, now recognized as one of the leading programs in Brazil. In 2009, he co-created the Computational Engineering undergraduate program, serving as its first coordinator. In graduate education, he has supervised more than 40 master’s theses and 20 doctoral dissertations, including award-winning work such as the CAPES Best PhD Thesis Award (2015), training researchers currently working in Brazil and abroad.
Professor dos Santos has delivered invited lectures and served as a visiting professor at institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, TU Berlin, UFRJ, UFMG, Peking University, and Queensland University of Technology, strengthening international collaborations and student mobility programs.
He has coordinated and participated in numerous projects funded by national and international agencies and companies, including CNPq, CAPES, FAPEMIG, the European Community, and NVIDIA, contributing to the acquisition of significant resources for academic infrastructure. These efforts supported the construction of buildings for Computational Modeling, Computational Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science at UFJF. His honors include the Endeavour Research Leadership Award from the Australian Government (2019) and the Juscelino Kubitschek Medal, UFJF’s highest distinction for outstanding contributions to society. He is also a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow.
Since 2017, he has served as a CAPES consultant in the Interdisciplinary area and, since 2009, as a CNPq consultant in Biomedical Engineering. He is a member of the Brazilian Society of Biomedical Engineering and the Brazilian Society of Applied and Computational Mathematics.
He is also active in science communication, giving interviews to radio, television, and newspapers, and publishing opinion articles in O Estado de São Paulo on science, education, and artificial intelligence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he developed forecasting models that informed public policy decisions. He currently coordinates the development of digital twins of the heart in partnership with the UFJF University Hospital, integrating science, innovation, and patient care.
