I am a statistician developing methods for the analysis of large, high-dimensional and complex data, and applying such methods in contemporary “Omics” sciences and other scientific fields – including Meteorology and Economics.

I received a Laurea (cum laude) in Statistic and Economic Sciences from the University of Rome La Sapienza (Rome, IT), where I worked with Giovanni Dosi on a thesis titled Processes of Microeconomic Innovation and Macroeconomic Dynamics, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN, USA), where I worked with R. Dennis Cook on a thesis titled A Reduction Paradigm for Multivariate Laws.

At Penn State, I am a faculty in the Department of Statistics and have a courtesy affiliation with the Department of Public Health Sciences. I am a member of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and of the Center for Medical Genomics, and the director of the Institute for Genome Sciences (one of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences). In 2019, I was named the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences “in recognition of outstanding interdisciplinary research, leadership and service to the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences”.

I also work in the Institute of Economics of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, IT), where I am the scientific coordinator for EMbeDS (Economics and Management in the era of Data Science), and I contribute to the PhD in Data Science (established as a consortium with the Scuola Normale Superiore, the University of Pisa, and other partners in the area in 2017) and to the PhD in AI for Society (one of the five graduate programs constituting the National Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence established in 2021).

Other academic institutions where I entertain collaborations and spent time over the years include the MOX laboratory of the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, IT), the Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi e Informatica of the CNR (Rome, IT), the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics of UCLA (Los Angeles, CA, USA), the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Biology of NYU (New York, NY, USA), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, AT), and the Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe NM, USA).

Since 2016, I am a Fellow of the American Statistical Association “for outstanding collaborative work in high throughput biology, contributions to methodology in statistics and bioinformatics, commitment to interdisciplinary research, and leadership in developing training programs at the interface of statistics, computation and the life sciences.”

Since 2022, I am a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics “for outstanding contributions to methodology for the analysis of large, complex and structured data, in particular to the fields of sufficient dimension reduction and envelope models, for outstanding interdisciplinary work in the ‘Omics’ and biomedical sciences, and for leadership in interdisciplinary training and mentoring efforts.”