#  Stefano Maria Iacus 

Associate of IQSS

Scientific Officer, European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency of the Joint Research Centre, European Commission

 

 

 



   ![Stefano Iacus](/sites/g/files/omnuum8171/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2026-07/Stefano%20Iacus%202026.jpg?h=96d500d5&itok=X-EoMQjU) 

 



 

 email <siacus@iq.harvard.edu> 

 



 

Stefano Iacus, a statistician, is currently scientific project officer at the European Commission, working on algorithmic transparency.

He has been Senior Research Scientist and Director of Data Science and Product Research of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University (2022-2025), where is also managed the development of the Dataverse Project, and contributed to the board of OpenDP project.  
  
In 1999, Iacus started his academic career at the University of Milan (Italy), where he became full professor of statistics in 2015, and also where he founded the Data Science Lab and served as its director. Since 2019, he has also served at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, where he led the team that explores new sources of data and exploits their advantages over traditional official statistical data, to support policymaking during crisis periods and refine preparedness measures. Since 2006, he has had a recurring visiting professor position at the University of Tokyo (Japan).  
  
Iacus’ accomplishments extend beyond academia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he managed a large scale business-to-government project for the European Commission, producing insights for policymaking using data from mobile network operators covering most European Union member states. In 2012, he co-founded a data science firm, Voices from the Blogs, that specialized in social media analysis and big data analytics. In 2017, he co-founded a second startup in the field of quantitative finance. Iacus has published several books, many scientific articles, and a variety of open-source software products in a number of fields including causal inference, sentiment analysis, inference for stochastic processes, computational statistics, and quantitative finance. His work is widely cited across scholarly fields.  
  
Iacus received his bachelor’s degree in statistics, magna cum laude, in 1995 at the Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). He completed his Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Padua (Italy) in 1998, and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1999 at the Le Mans University (France).



 

 

 





 

 

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