About me

Hello! I am Francesca Panero, Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics of the London School of Economics. I am also affiliate of the Data Science Institute (LSE) and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (LSE).

In 2022 I obtained a PhD in Statistics from the University of Oxford. Before the PhD, I spent quite some time (BSc and MSc) at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Turin and at Collegio Carlo Alberto.

I live in London, but you will often find me in Rome.

You can contact me at f [dot] panero [at] lse.ac.uk

Projects

In terms of research, I mostly work on Bayesian models in the following directions: complex networks, disclosure risk assessment (privacy stuff) and Gaussian process modelling. I am also exploring fair machine learning. At the moment, I am working on the following projects:

• Bayesian nonparametric models for sparse networks, in particular networks embedded in a latent space or with dynamic communities. The theorethical framework of these is the graphex, which was introduced (under a different name) by Caron and Fox (2014). I am working on these with F. Caron, J. Rousseau and X. Miscouridou.
• Spatio-temporal Gaussian process models to predict food insecurity at country and regional level. This is joint work with S. Ishida and the UN World Food Programme Hunger Monitoring Unit. This project is supported by a RISF grant by LSE.
• Fair machine learning, in particular models with a ridge penalty to enforce some fairness constraints and how to quantify the uncertainty of the estimators. I am currently working on this with M. Scutari and E. Wit.

On the educational side, I am part of the core team of GENIAL, a focus group at LSE that aims at understanding how students use GenAI tools for learning.

If you are interested in doing a PhD with me, please do get in touch specifying which of my areas of research would be of interest to you. Note that applications for scholarships at LSE close around mid-January, so getting in contact in October/November is recommended in order to have enough time to prepare a research proposal.

News

Finally, where can you find me in the next few months?

• In May 2024, I will present my research at the S3RI seminar at the University of Southampton, and the Statistics seminars at the University of Oxford.
• In June/July 2024, I will be speaking at the ISBA Satellite workshop in Lugano and present a poster at the ISBA World Meeting in Venice.
• In September 2024, I will present my work at the BIRS workshop “Frontiers of Bayesian Inference and Data Science” in Oaxaca.