Cristhian Parra
UNDP Paraguay Accelerator Lab
Head of Experimentation
Cristian Parra has a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies from University of Trento, Italy, and an Informatics Engineering degree from the Polytechnic School of UNA. For the past 10 years, he has been working in social informatics R&D projects, using participatory design and human-centered design approaches to topics in community-based public health, social inclusion, civic technologies and citizen participation. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the projects of the Social Apps Lab (CITRIS). As consultant, he helped organizations like the World Bank, the IADB, the SSI of Berkeley, among others. Before joining AccLab, he was working as a Senior Researcher at the Catholic University of Asunción, where he led projects like TopaDengue, which combines community participation with technologies to fight the spread of the Aedes Aegypti through a bottom-up citizen science approach, within a controlled experiment. In 2018, with his team, he was the recipient of one of the Honorific Mentions of the National Prize for Science for some of these works. Cristhian has always had a passion for initiatives at intersections, bridging Computer and Social Sciences to inform research, development, and implementation of innovative socio-technical solutions for social or community challenges. This passion led him straight to this lab, where he sees a unique opportunity to contribute to the already great work that UNDP is doing in solving the big societal and development challenges of our century.