Victoria Stodden, statistician and associate professor at the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, has been selected to receive a prestigious Humboldt Research Award.

Granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the award is bestowed on internationally leading researchers in recognition of outstanding academic achievements. A key goal of the award is to facilitate international scientific collaboration, as awardees spend up to a year at research institutions in Germany, where they collaborate with specialist colleagues.

“This is a very exciting step for me. The award recognizes more than a single result or paper, it is an appreciation of my entire research agenda,” said Stodden.
Stodden, who has been serving as vice-chair of the HITS Scientific Advisory Board since 2022, is a global leader in the field of reproducibility in computational and data science, exploring how the reliability and replicability of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches can be ensured. Her work also addresses standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, and scientific publishing practices.

“Victoria Stodden’s research and expertise are of utmost importance to HITS, where computational and data science take center stage,” says Tilmann Gneiting, Scientific Director at HITS and leader of the Computational Statistics group at HITS and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Stodden’s research agenda also plays crucial roles at the KIT Graduate School Computational and Data Science (KCDS) where Stodden will serve as a visiting professor, supported by a KIT International Excellence Fellowship. “We very much look forward to welcoming Victoria Stodden in Heidelberg and Karlsruhe from January 2025 onwards,” say Gneiting and co-host Melanie Schienle at KIT.
Stodden earned her Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University, and her law degree from Stanford Law School. She has served on various committees of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and co-chaired the US National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure. Her membership in the HITS Scientific Advisory Board will be suspended during the research stay in Germany.