MARCOS FERNANDEZ PICHEL

Marcos Fernández Pichel is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics and Computing, affiliated with the Higher Technical School of Engineering at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He holds a Doctorate from the same institution (2023) with a thesis focused on technologies for analyzing health-related online content credibility.

His research focuses on health information credibility assessment, natural language processing (NLP), and misinformation detection. He collaborates with the Singular Center for Research in Intelligent Technologies (CiTIUS) and has developed systems like Depressmind for mental health surveillance on social media, and Social Minder for detecting pandemic-related misinformation. His work has been recognized by the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences' award for best young researcher article (2022).

Key projects include analysis of search engine performance for health queries, LLM-based depression symptom assessment, and risk communication strategies for radon gas. He has contributed to TREC Health Misinformation Track competitions (2021-2022), demonstrating expertise in retrieval systems and misinformation detection methodologies.

Pichel's research often bridges computational linguistics with public health applications, emphasizing real-time monitoring of dynamic web sources (e.g., eXtream system). His work frequently involves semi-supervised learning techniques and ethical considerations in AI-driven health communication systems.