Guest Lecture, Professor Sonali Das: "Sustainability and climate risk research" on Monday, April 7th at 14.15-15.45

Sustainability entails dealing with questions such as: What are climate-induced risks?; How can we quantify them?; How do we manage them? Over her research career, among others, Professor Sonali Das has focused on investigating various in situ weather features that have both direct and indirect impact on businesses' decisions.  Such features can range from data being continuous on the real line or continuous and bounded to being zero-inflated or circular, with each requiring the development of novel strategies to understand their evolution over time. As such, a substantial part of Prof Das’ research focuses on the development of statistical methods such as those using functional data analysis techniques to explore rates of change of temperature measurements, studying wildfire scars using survival analysis methods, and on Bayesian cylindrical methods to predict the direction of extreme winds, all in order to use data to inform better decisions.

Professor Sonali Das from the University of Pretoria, South Africa, will visit the Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, from April 2^nd until 22^nd April. At this occasion, she will give a guest lecture on her research addressing climate risks. The lecture will be organized in a hybrid form (LS 01 at TSE or https://utu.zoom.us/j/61213953831)

It is also possible to book a meeting with Prof Das to discuss her research and/or to receive comments on a research design/research paper on a related topic or other collaboration. For meeting requests, please get in touch with her host, Prof Ulla Hytti, ulla.hytti@utu.fi, or agree personally with Prof Das after her talk.

A bio for Prof Sonali Das: 

Prof Sonali Das obtained her PhD in Statistics from the University of Connecticut (USA) in 2006, having obtained her Masters (Statistics) from the University of Calcutta, and BSc (Statistics) from Presidency College, Kolkata, in India. Between 1997 and 2001 Sonali worked as a Scientist at the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi. In 2007, she joined the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria as a Senior Researcher, and was promoted to Principal Researcher in 2013. After about 13 years at the CSIR, Sonali joined the Department of Business Management at the University of Pretoria in 2019.

In 2023 and 2024, Sonali was a Global Mentor for Master in Business Analytics and Big Data program at the IE School of Science and Technology, Madrid, Spain. In 2019, she became an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). Sonali is currently a Council member of the South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP) for a term of 5-years, a Council member of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics (ISBIS), and a Member of the ISI Advisory Board on Ethics.

She has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the South African Statistical Association (SASA) and is currently the Chair of the Bayes Special Interest Group of SASA. Sonali is an Associate Editor of Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry (ASMBI), the Journal of the Indian Statistical Association (JISA), and the South African Statistical Journal (SASJ).