Gonzalo Navarro

Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the Universidad de Chile, PhD in Computer Science from the same institution, and Associate Researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), where he leads the Multimodal Data research line together with Diego Arroyuelo. His main areas of work are algorithms and data structures, compact data structures, text and graph databases, and information retrieval.

He is a Fellow of theAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM, 2022) —a distinction awarded to fewer than 1% of its members, based on the track record, quality, and impact of their research— and Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He has received the Imre Simon Test-of-Time Award for research with sustained impact over more than 20 years, seven Best Paper Awards at international conferences, and four Google Research Awards, among other recognitions.

He was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics and a member of the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Algorithms. He is co-creator of the conference Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP), and has served on the Steering Committee of SPIRE, LATIN, and SISAP. He has given more than 50 invited talks at universities and international conferences, including 12 plenary talks.

He is co-author of two books published by Cambridge University Press —Flexible Pattern Matching in Strings (2002) and Compact Data Structures (2016)—, more than 200 articles in international journals, and more than 270 in conference proceedings. In 2026 he was recognized as the best researcher in the country in the field of Computer Science in the ranking Best Computer Science Scientists in Chile, compiled by Research.com.