Portrait of Elena Bortolato

Elena Bortolato

Assistant Professor of Statistics
CUNEF University, Madrid

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About

I work at CUNEF University in Madrid as Assistant Professor. Before that, I was a post-doctoral researcher in Statistics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Data Science Center of the Barcelona School of Economics.

I earned my PhD in 2024 under the supervision of prof. Laura Ventura, co-supervised by prof. Pierre E. Jacob (ESSEC) and prof. Robin J. Ryder (Imperial College London).

Research

My research interests include the following areas. Click a card to read more.

Bayesian & frequentist inference

Bayesian and frequentist inference, robustness, and model misspecification.

Computational statistics & MCMC

Computational statistics and Monte Carlo methods, with particular emphasis on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms on manifolds.

Simulation-based inference & statistical evidence

Simulation-based (likelihood-free) inference, uncertainty quantification, and measures of statistical evidence (including p-values and confidence distributions), together with their interplay with probabilistic machine learning.

Latent variables & high-dimensional data

Latent variable models, factor analysis, and statistical methods for high-dimensional data.

Approximate & objective Bayes

Approximate inference and objective methods in Bayesian statistics.

Biomedicine & health sciences

Applications of statistical methodology to biomedicine and health sciences.

Publications

A full list of publications is available on Google Scholar, and code can be found on GitHub.

Preprints and working papers

  • MCMC on manifolds and couplingsJoint work with P.E. Jacob and R.J. Ryder
  • Birth death graphical modelsWith David Rossell and Stephen Hansen

Teaching

Current teaching activity

  • Data Analysis2026–27CUNEF University, Double degree in Business Administration and Law
  • Econometrics2026–27CUNEF University, Double degree in Business Administration and Law

Previous teaching

  • Computational Machine Learning and Deep Learning2024–252025–26Barcelona School of Economics, Master in Data Science Methodology

Education

  • PhD in Statistics2024University of Padova. Thesis: Advancements in distribution sampling for statistical inference
  • MSc in Statistics2018–2020University of Padova. Thesis: Bias reduction in Multivariate equicorrelated Gaussian models. Best Thesis in Mathematical Statistics 2020, Società Italiana di Statistica
  • BSc in Statistics2015–2018University of Padova. Thesis: Methods and models for music analysis