Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça is Chair of the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, and has served since 2024 as President of UFMG’s Standing Committee on Artificial Intelligence. He coordinates Margem – Research Group on Democracy and Justice and serves as Deputy Director of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD). He is also an associate researcher and long-term collaborator of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, University of Canberra.

He was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine, supported by a Fulbright fellowship. Over the course of his career, he has coordinated eleven research projects funded by national and international agencies.

His research interests include democratic theory, contentious politics, and political communication. He is the co-author of Algorithmic Institutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2023; with V. Almeida and F. Filgueiras) and co-editor of Crises of Democracy and the Public Sphere (Editora UFMG, 2023, with R. Sarmento) and Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022, with S. Ercan, H. Asenbaum and N. Curato), among other books and numerous journal publications.

His work has received several distinctions, including the Best Book Award from the Brazilian Political Science Association in 2024 and the Harrison Prize from the Political Studies Association (UK) in 2012. He has also received distinctions for excellence in teaching and supervision, including the prestigious CAPES Award for Academic Supervision on two occasions.