Alejandra Avalos-Pacheco
Awards
2020 Audience choice award for my poster "Leveraging external data in Bayesian adaptive designs", 2020 Global Conference in Regulatory Science, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University (Massachusetts, USA).
2019 Savage award granted by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) and the American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Bayesian Statistical Science (SBSS). Best PhD thesis in the category Applied Methodology: "Factor regression for dimensionality reduction and data integration techniques with applications to cancer data".
Travel awards:
2024 ISBA World Meeting in Venice, Italy, awarded by ISBA and G-RESEARCH.
2023 International Conference on Statistics and Data Science in Lisbon Portugal, awarded by IMS & Industry Friends of IMS
2023 BayesComp in Levi Finland, awarded by ISBA.
2022 ISBA World Meeting in Montreal, Canada, awarded by ISBA and the UCLA Department of Biostatistics.
2019 O'Bayes in Warwick, UK, awarded by ISBA
2017 O'Bayes in Texas, USA, awarded by ISBA.
grants
2024-2027 EULiST Alliance Research and Innovation Doctoral Funds, and the LUT School of Engineering Sciences, Finland
Role: co-PI
Other PIs: Prof. Lassi Roininen (Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Finland) and Dr Matt Moores (University of Wollongong, Australia).
Project: Bayesian inference for water hyacinth's spatio-temporal dynamics.
€130,000.00 (approximately) covering the salary of one PhD student, travels and research visits.
2023-2024 European Union - Next GenerationEU, and the University of Florence. Young Independent Researchers Call
Original role: team leader (withdrawn)
Current role: external collaborator
Original team members: Dr V. Ballerini & Dr M. Pedone
Grant no. B008-P00634
Project: Bayesian Methods for Clinical and Observational Studies (BayesMeCOS).
€236,000.00 covering the salary of three researchers, travels and research visits.
On the media
About me
I am a tenure track Universitätsassistentin in the Institute of Applied Statistics at JKU Linz, Austria. I am also an affiliated member at Harvard University in the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science.
I hold a PhD in Statistics on the joint CDT programme between the University of Warwick and the University of Oxford (OxWASP). My PhD thesis, supervised by Prof. David Rossell and Prof. Richard Savage, was granted the Savage Award in Applied Methodology. I was a postdoctoral fellow in Statistics at Harvard University in the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science, and I was also part of Prof. Lorenzo Trippa's group at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the Department of Data Science. Following this, I was a research fellow at the University of Florence in the Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Applications ''G. Parenti'', working with Prof. Francesco Stingo and Prof. Monia Lupparelli. Later, I was a non-tenure track Universitätsassistentin in the Research Unit of Applied Statistics at the Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien).
My main goal is to create interpretable and computationally efficient models for large complex data. I aim to give a better understanding of real world problems, and help to provide fast accurate decisions. I am interested in applications to problems in medicine, in particular cancer. I develop statistical methods for large heterogenous data, mainly leveraging Bayesian and probabilistic machine learning algorithms, and focusing on data integration. My main research interests include high-dimensional inference, applied Bayesian statistical modelling, dimensionality reduction, heterogenous data integration, graphical models, and clinical trials.
News
Blake Hansen won a 2024 Best Poster Award for his poster based on our JCGS work from the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)!
Blake Hansen was awarded a 2024 Student Paper Award for the paper "Fast Variational Inference for Bayesian Factor Analysis in Single and Multi-Study Settings" from the New England Statistical Society (NESS)! This is a joint work between B. Hansen, Dr Roberta De Vito, Dr Massimiliano Russo and myself.
I was granted a visiting position allowing me to engage with the researchers at the University of Sydney (Dr Clara Grazian), the University of Wollongong (Dr Matt Moores), and Monash University (Dr Jack Jewson). This was awarded by the Scientific Advisory Committee of The University of Sydney Mathematical Research Institute (SMRI), as part of their International Visitor Program!
I am part of the Complex Graphical Models for Biological Network Science (COMBINERS) grant team, lead by Prof. Francesco Stingo. This project, funded by the European Union - Next GenerationEU and the Italian Ministry of Education, concerns the development of novel principled statistical tools for the analysis of complex networks under non-standard experimental setups. It is developed by the collaborative efforts of four research units based at the University of Florence, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, University of Padova and University of Palermo.
Our "Frontiers of Bayesian Inference and Data Science" conference proposal got selected by the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS), to be part of its 2024 sponsor conferences! I am honoured to co-organise this with Prof. Peter Mueller, Dr Ma. Fernanda Gil Leyva Villa and Dr Alan Riva Palacio and Dr Fan Bu
I have been appointed as an Senior Associate Editor of the newly approved ACM Transactions on Probabilistic Machine Learning (TOPML).
I am part of the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science as an Affiliated Member!
Contact
alejandra.avalos_pacheco(at)jku.at