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About
Matías Deneken is a PhD student in Computational Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he is supervised by Milena Tsvetkova and is part of her ERC-funded HUMANET Lab, which studies networks of humans and intelligent machines.
His doctorate is funded by Chile's National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), after he ranked first in the artificial intelligence area of the Becas Chile doctoral competition.
He holds a BA in Sociology from the Universidad de Concepción, where he received the University of Concepción Award as the top student of his cohort, and two master's degrees from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile: an MA in Sociology, funded by ANID's National Master's Scholarship, and a Master's in Data Science and Innovation. All three degrees were awarded with highest distinction.
He has worked at two leading Chilean research centres: the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR), where he led the technical coordination of the fourth wave of the Longitudinal Survey of Intercultural Relations (ELRI), and the Observatory of Violence and Social Legitimacy (OLES), where he is part of the core team of the Longitudinal Study of Perceptions of Security (ELSEP). He has also contributed to research on right-wing parties in Latin America and collaborated with UNDP on the participation of Indigenous peoples and minorities in Chile's constitutional process. He is the founder of Methodo+Lab, an applied data science initiative that supports computational social science.
You can visit his website at www.deneken.me.
Research interests:
Social norms, on-line experiments, computational social science, intergroup relations, natural language processing, agent based model, LLM.
Research
Peer reviewed articles
Gerber, M. M., Castelo Branco, F., Cubas, V., Sáez-Fuentealba, L., de Oliveira, A. R., Deneken, M., & Jackson, J. (2026). Fear of the police and the fragility of legitimacy: Insights from Chile and Brazil. International Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
Díaz, F., González, R., …, & Deneken, M. (In press) How intergroup contact and social norms shape outgroup trust over time among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Political Psychology.
Alenda, S., Sandoval, C., Somma, N., & Deneken, M (Accepted with major revisions). Varieties of radical right discourse in Chile: A comparative analysis of José Antonio Kast and Johannes Kaiser. Latin American Research Review.
Deneken, M. (2025). The brief history of the Center for the Study of National Reality, CEREN (1968–1973). Revista Temas Sociológicos, 37. [in Spanish]
Maltrain, V., Cárdenas, J. C., Iglesias, M., & Deneken, M. (2023). "Camouflaged sociology" at ARCIS (1984–1991): Critique, commitment, and militancy. Revista Izquierdas, 52. [in Spanish]
UNDER REVIEW
Deneken, M., Cárdenas, J. C., Maltrain, V., & Iglesias, M. Autonomy under tutelage: Militancy, Freemasonry and the refoundation of sociology at the University of Concepción (1990–1999). Submitted to Revista de Historia (Universidad de Concepción).
Books and edited volumes
Deneken, M., & Valenzuela, E. (Eds.) (2025). Radiografía del cambio intercultural en Chile: Dinámicas contemporáneas entre población indígena y no indígena. Editorial Catalonia.
Book chapters
Valenzuela, E., & Deneken, M. (2025). El problema de la identificación indígena: Un análisis longitudinal. In M. Deneken & E. Valenzuela (Eds.), (Re)configuraciones interculturales. Editorial Catalonia.
Deneken, M. (2025). Descifrando el voto de indígenas y no indígenas en Chile en el referéndum constitucional del 4 de septiembre de 2022: Un enfoque psicosocial. In M. Deneken & E. Valenzuela (Eds.), (Re)configuraciones interculturales. Editorial Catalonia.
Deneken, M. (2023). An exonerated story: The Center for the Study of National Reality (1968–1973). In C. Karle (Ed.), CEREN, an unfinished project. 50 years later (pp. 23–33). Ediciones FEUC.