Dr. Stefano Iacus 

Dr. Stefano Iacus is a Senior Research Scientist and the Director of Data Science and Product Research at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. He is also the Managing Director of the open source software called The Dataverse Project. He started academic career at the University of Milan (Italy), where he became full professor of statistics in 2015, and where he founded the Data Science Lab and served as its director. Since 2019, he has served at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, where he led the team that explores new data sources and exploits their advantages over traditional official statistical data, to support policy making during crisis periods and refine preparedness measures. Iacus has been a member of the R Core Team to develop the R statistical environment during 1999-2014, and now a member of the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Iacus’s accomplishments extend beyond academia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he managed a large-scale business-to-government project for the European Commission, producing insights for policy-making using data from mobile network operators covering most European Union member states. Iacus has published several books, many scientific articles, and a variety of open-source software products in a number of fields including causal inference, sentiment analysis, inference for stochastic processes, computational statistics, and quantitative finance. His work is widely cited across scholarly fields.