Please register for this event under the link provided on the right. We will send the link to registered attendees 1 hour before the talk starts. Please note that registration closes at 8:00am CET on March 12, 2021.
ABSTRACT / Now, more than ever, our world is measured and explained with data. The large abundance of data in natural and social sciences has fueled the increasing demand to understand the phenomena around us using statistics and data science tools. In this talk, I will tell you about my journey in statistics and data science and how I have come to work in a very diverse range of multidisciplinary projects with policymakers and researchers of various disciplines including oceanographers, marine scientists, criminologist, social scientists, and econometricians. From climate to social science research, statistics has allowed me to work both in academia and the public sector in partnership with industry players to solve real- life problems and to support informed decisions in policy and decision-making. We will also be looking at a variety of interdisciplinary projects in which I have worked including reconstruction of vegetation during the Holocene using data from fossil pollen extracted from lake sediments, evaluation of social programs and intervention policies based on crime incidents, and study of the coral microbiome to understand coral resilience to climate change. Finally, I will touch on some of the new projects in which I am currently working such as poverty prediction using data from different sources and causality in climate dynamics.
BIO / Dr Patricia Menéndez is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash Business School of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Patricia’s training is in mathematics and statistics, she received her PhD from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Since completion of her study, Patricia has held several academic positions at Wageningen University, the University of New South Wales, and the University of Queensland. Before joining the School, she had also worked outside of academia as a statistician/data scientist/research scientist for the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research and also for the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Patricia has work experience in multidisciplinary projects to answer research and policy- making questions in the fields of climate change, environmental and marine sciences besides criminology and social sciences. She is also experienced in delivering statistical training and consultancy services. Patricia is passionate about the development and application of statistical methodology in solving real-life problems as well as bringing statistical knowledge closer to other disciplines. Her research interests include statistical inference, computational statistics, machine learn- ing, causal inference to understand complex interactions between climatic factors, data visualization tools for high dimensional problems, and data science for social good.