Gerda Claeskens

Gerda Claeskens is a full professor of Statistics at the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) at KU Leuven, Belgium. She holds positions in the Operations Research and Statistics Research Group (ORSTAT) and is affiliated with the Leuven Statistics Research Center. Her academic journey includes a Licentiate in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Antwerp and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Limburgs Universitair Centrum (now Hasselt University).

Research Interests: Her work focuses on model selection, post-selection inference, nonparametric methods, and high-dimensional statistics. She has contributed extensively to methodologies like focused information criteria, penalized splines, and quantile regression.

Awards and Honors: Notable accolades include Fellow of the American Statistical Association (2019), Goodeve Medal (2017), and Medallion Lecturer (2016). She has also held editorial roles in top journals such as Biometrika and Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Teaching and Mentoring: She has advised over 20 PhD students and mentored postdoctoral researchers. Her teaching spans advanced statistical methods, probability theory, and business statistics. She has delivered invited lectures globally, including at the European Meeting of Statisticians and the International Society for NonParametric Statistics.

Key Contributions: Her book Model Selection and Model Averaging (2008) is a seminal work in statistical methodology. Her research addresses challenges in high-dimensional data, survival analysis, and model averaging, with applications in finance, insurance, and biostatistics.