Mónica Balzarini

Dr. Monica Balzarini was born on February 9, 1962, in Córdoba, Argentina. She graduated as an Agricultural Engineer from the National University of Córdoba, and then she obtained the academic degree of Magister Scientiae in Biometrics from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. In 2000 she received the PhD degree at Louisiana State University in the United States. Education and work experiences have made Monica Balzarini a highly specialized applied statistics and data scientist working in education, development, and implementation of quantitative methods in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. She is currently a full Professor of Statistics and Biometrics in the College of Agricultural Sciences of the National University of Córdoba, Principal Investigator of the National Council of Science and Technology of Argentina (CONICET) on agricultural statistics research, and Deputy Director of UFYMA (Research Institute of Phytopathology and Agricultural Modeling), INTA-CONICET. Her specialty is the study and application of statistical modelling in life sciences, particularly in Agriculture and Environment. Within that framework, she has conducted research on data science algorithms and developed data analysis protocols and statistical software applications that are widely used by the scientific community; she has obtained several national and international grants to develop these topics. Dr. Balzarini participated in notable developments that reveal the importance of her scientific work, such as the statistical software InfoStat and its user manual, including multiple examples of statistical analyses in life sciences (Balzarini et al., 2008), and InfoGen, a software for genetic data analysis with illustrations of statistical applications in multi-environment trials and biotechnology (Balzarini et al, 2005; Balzarini et al., 2010). She has also led the development of FastMapping, a statistical software package that deals with spatial data in precision agriculture experiments. All these developments were transferred to the scientific community as free software and involve hundreds of thousands of users across the world, and particularly in South America and the Caribbean region of the International Biometric Society (IBS). The teaching notes Applications of Multivariate Analysis (CAVILA, Latin American virtual classroom course) (Balzarini et al., 2015) supported numerous courses of multivariate analysis in the region. Her contributions on methodological developments for the analysis of multivariate and correlated data, embedded in problems of Agriculture, Forestry, Genetics, and Environment, account for the great contribution of Dr. Balzarini to the development of scientific knowledge. Dr. Mónica Balzarini has had an outstanding performance in national and international scientific research organizations with active participation in the International Biometrics Society (IBS). She has been a founding partner and President of the Argentine Biometric Region of the IBS.