Two Leonardo Da Vinci Grants to Bocconi Scholars

By obtaining two grants under the "Leonardo Da Vinci" call of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, Bocconi confirms its contribution to the "promotion abroad of Italian higher education".

Dovev Lavie, a Full-Professor at the Department of Management and Technology, has obtained funding for his visiting professorship at Technion, a prestigious institute of technology in Haifa, Israel. The Ministry aims, in fact, to promote structured contacts with international centers of excellence in higher education and international research.

Daniele Durante, Assistant Professor in Statistics at the Department of Decision Science and Research Affiliate of the Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analytics (BIDSA), has received the Leonardo Da Vinci Medal, which is awarded to the best scientific contributions by junior researchers. His article "Bayesian Inference and Testing of Group Differences in Brain Networks", published with David Dunson (Duke University) in Bayesian Analysis, offers a excellent example of what the Data Science is, in that it showcases the growing synergy between Statistics and the new technologies, which produce increasingly complex data such as detailed images of the interconnections among anatomical regions in human brains. The model proposed in the article sheds light on the relationships between the brain connectivity structures and human traits such as creativity, intelligence and cognitive decline. "This article is part of a broader line of research where I try to answer, through the development of innovative statistical methods and models, to the applied and computational problems underlying the large amount of complex data that are available nowadays in many fields of science", says Durante.