Gonzalo Navarro

Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chile, Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution, and Research Associate at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, where he leads the Multimodal Data research line alongside Diego Arroyuelo. His main areas of research 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)—an honor bestowed on fewer than 1% of its members, based on their career achievements, the quality of their research, and its impact—and a 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 honors. 

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

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