Francesca Dominici

Francesca Dominici is a professor of biostatistics at Harvard University. She develops methodology in causal inference and data science and leads research projects that combine big data with health policy and climate change. She is the director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and a former senior associate dean for research in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Education and career Dominici earned her bachelor's degree in statistics from Sapienza University of Rome in 1993, and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Padua in 1997. She was a professor of biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1997 to 2009, with a joint appointment in epidemiology. On moving to Harvard in 2009, she was also given an honorary Master of Public Health degree from Harvard, following the tradition that Harvard faculty must have Harvard degrees.

Contributions

Dominici has been active on many study committees on public health, organized by the National Academy of Sciences, National Institutes of Health, and others. Her work in data science has informed revisions of the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards policy in February 7, 2024.

Dominici became a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2005. She is also a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018.

In 2006, she won the Mortimer Spiegelman Award of the American Public Health Association. She is the 2015 winner of the Florence Nightingale David Award of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, and the 2016 winner of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement in Statistical Sciences, which honors a woman statistician for achievement. In 2020, she won the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research.