Francesca Chiaromonte named a Fellow of the AAAS
Francesca Chiaromonte, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences at Penn State, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a Fellow is a lifetime honor bestowed by peers upon members of the AAAS, the world's largest general scientific society, for their extraordinary achievements in advancing science. Chiaromonte was honored for distinguished contributions to the field of statistics, the development of methods for the analysis of large, complex and structured data, and their application in the biomedical and social sciences.
“Francesca has made important methodological contributions in the area of functional data analysis,” said Nicole Lazar, head of the Department of Statistics. “These contributions improve our ability to analyze complex life science data, particularly genomics. In addition to her impressive research accomplishments, she is a passionate educator and mentor, and we are proud that she is being recognized with this well-deserved honor.”
Chiaromonte is one of two Penn State Eberly College of Science faculty members, including Seth Bordenstein, and one of four at the University, out of the 449 fellows AAAS has named for 2025.
In her research, Chiaromonte explores methods to analyze high-dimensional, complex, structured, and potentially under-sampled data. These methods include dimension reduction, feature selection and feature screening algorithms, computational techniques for the assessment of significance and stability, latent structure and Markov modeling approaches, and functional data analysis methods. Chiaromonte works closely with scientists in a variety of fields, including biomedical research – in particular, “omics” sciences, meteorology, and economics. For example, in the early 2000s, Chiaromonte contributed to the work of several genome consortia, developing methods to compare and align genome sequences, estimate how much of the human genome is being conserved through selection, and predict which parts of the genome are functional. In the decades since, through collaborations with biologists and computer scientists, she participated in important studies that characterized the dynamics of genomes. She also contributed to research on the socio-economic impacts of climate change.
Chiaromonte joined the Penn State Department of Statistics as an assistant professor in 1998 and soon became involved with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences as one of the founding members of the Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics—a precursor to the current Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics—and of the Center for Medical Genomics, and as director of the Institute for Genome Sciences. Additionally, she actively maintains multiple international collaborations, including work with the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, where she serves as the scientific coordinator of the Department of Excellence for Economics, Management and Law in the era of Data Science.
Chiaromonte is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and of the American Statistical Association. She received a master’s degree in statistic and economic sciences from the University of Rome La Sapienza in Italy and a doctorate in statistics from the University of Minnesota.
AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For additional information visit the AAAS website.