Cristóbal Cobo is a former non-resident senior fellow for the Education Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. He is a senior education specialist at the World Bank, focusing on the effective and appropriate use of new technologies in education. Before joining the World Bank in 2019, Cobo spent 15 years working at the intersection of the future of learning, cultures of innovation, and human-centered technologies across both developed and developing countries, serving as founding director of the Center for Research – Ceibal Foundation in Uruguay (2014-2019) and associated researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (2009-2019).
Cobo has been distinguished by the British Council of Economic and Social Research (ESRC) and was an associate research fellow at the Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance at the University of Oxford. He was professor and director of Communication and New Technologies at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico. He has served as an external evaluator for the Inter-American Development Bank, the National Science Foundation, MIT Press, the International Labour Organization, and the International Development Research Centre.
He has PhD in Communication Sciences at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and is the author of multiple books, including Invisible Learning (2011), Innovación Pendiente (Penguin Random House, 2016), and I accept the terms and conditions: Uses and abuses of digital technologies (Santillana, 2019). He has also published over 80 academic articles. He has been a speaker in more than 30 countries and has been featured by CNN, Deutsche Welle, El País, Le Monde Diplomatique, or Wall Street Journal.