Cristóbal Cobo is a Senior Education Specialist at the World Bank, focusing on the effective and appropriate use of new technologies in education in middle- and low-income countries and emerging markets around the world. Since joining the World Bank in 2019, he has worked in the Education Global Practice and is currently focused on the Europe and Central Asia region. Dr. Cobo spent 20 years working at the intersection of future of learning, cultures of innovation and human-centered technologies across both developed and developing countries.
From 2014-2019, Dr. Cobo served as founding Director of the Center for Research at the Ceibal Foundation in Uruguay, leading initiatives to learn from one of the world’s most notable examples of the use of educational technologies at scale across an entire education system, Plan Ceibal. Created in 2007, the pioneering Plan Ceibal has provided all students in public education with a free computer and connected all public schools to the Internet, part of a larger national effort to support greater inclusion and equal opportunities within the education system.
Before joining the Center for Research at the Ceibal Foundation, Cristóbal spent five years as an associate researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (UK). Prior to that, Dr. Cobo was professor and director of communications at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Mexico from 2005 to 2010. A well-known speaker on topics related to the use of new technologies in education around the world, Cristóbal has provided keynote addresses in over 30 countries and spoken at four TEDx events.
He has also served as a consultant for a number of national education programs across Latin America, most notably Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina. He has published four books and over 80 academic articles; his most recent publication is I accept the terms and conditions: Uses and abuses of digital technologies (2019).
A native of Chile, Cristóbal received his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.