EDEFONTI VALERIA CARLA

Personal information
Name EDEFONTI, VALERIA CARLA

Current position Associate Professor (from March 31, 2020)
Settore Scientifico Disciplinare (SSD) MEDS-24/A – Medical Statistics
Location Laboratorio di Statistica Medica, Biometria ed Epidemiologia “G. A. Maccacaro”, Dipartimento di Scienze Cliniche e di Comunità – Dipartimento di Eccellenza 2023-2027, Università degli Studi di Milano

Date of birth May 18, 1977

Education
- April 2006 – PhD in Statistics – Bocconi University, Milan
- April 2002 – Degree in Economics and Social Sciences (110/110 cum laude) – Bocconi University, Milan

Professional Experience
Italy:
- January 2020: National Academic Qualification as Associate and Full Professor in Medical Statistics
- March 2017 – March 2020: RTD-B in the same Lab
- December 2013 – December 2016: RTD-A in the same Lab
Abroad:
- 2020 – today: Editorial Board, Nutrients
- F2019 – today: Study Coordinator, ‘Milan’ study, International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology (INHANCE) Consortium
- November 26, 2018 – December 6, 2018: Visiting Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, Dana - Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA
- June 4 - 21, 2018: Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
- September 26, 2016 – today: Editorial Board, Frontiers in Oncology, Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention section

Awards and Honors
- Premio SIS - Società Italiana di Statistica 2007/2008 for the best Italian PhD thesis in Statistics
- ECNIS (Environmental Cancer Risk, Nutrition and Individual Susceptibility) Training Fellowship for supporting a 1-month visit at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France, May 2008
- ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis) New Researchers Travel Award Valencia/ISBA 8th World Meeting on Bayesian Statistics, Benidorm, Spain, 2006

Recent Conferences and Scientific Meetings
- 2026, 2025, 2024, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 – 14th – 22th INHANCE Meeting – INVITED SPEAKER AND ORGANIZING COMMITTEE in 2018 and 2025
- 2025, 2023, 2021, 2019, 2017 IX – XIII Congresso Nazionale SISMEC – SPEAKER, ORGANIZING COMMITTEE, AND POSTER EVALUATION COMMITTEE in 2017
- 2025, 2023, 2021, 2019, 2017 – Italian Region of the International Biometric Society (IBS) – SPEAKER, ORGANIZING COMMITTEE AND INVITED SPEAKER in 2023
- 2025 – 13rd Stomach cancer Pooling Project, Milano – INVITED SPEAKER
- 2024 – Università di Roma, La Sapienza, Roma – INVITED SPEAKER from Luigi Palla
- 2024 – CPO, Torino – INVITED SPEAKER from Barbara Maule
- 2022, 2018 – 29th and 31st International Biometric Conference – SPEAKER
- 2022 – ICRA9 - 9th International Conference on Risk Analysis, Perugia – ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
- 2019 – ASA 2019 Scientific Conference on Statistics for Health and Well-being, Brescia – INVITED SPEAKER
- 2018 – Biostatistics Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, USA – INVITED SPEAKER
- 2018 – Department of Computer Science, Princeton University – Princeton, USA – INVITED SPEAKER

Institutional Responsibilities at the University of Milan
- October 2023 – today: Quality Assurance Manager, Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Scienze Riabilitative delle Professioni Sanitarie
- September 2021 – today: Statistician, VicePresident, Institutional Review Board
- December 2018 – today: Anticorruption Referent, Dipartimento di Scienze Cliniche e di Comunità
- October 2020 – today: Human Resources Board, Dipartimento di Scienze Cliniche e di Comunità
- 2013 – today: Scientific Board of the PhD program in Public Health Sciences
- 2013 – today: Scientific Board of the Postgraduate Diploma in ’Medical Statistics’
- January 2021 – January 2023: “Gruppo del Riesame”, Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Scienze Riabilitative delle Professioni Sanitarie
- December 2017 – December 2019: Joint Committee, Corso di Laurea in Igiene Dentale
- October 2017 – October 2020: School of Medicine Faculty member
- October 2017 – October 2020: Department Advisory Board, Dipartimento di Scienze Cliniche e di Comunità
- October 2017 – October 2020: Committee on Procurement, Dipartimento di Scienze Cliniche e di Comunità

Outreach activities
- February 2026: The INDACO project: statistics and machine learning from life-style factors to cancer prediction’, Meeting conclusivo del progetto PRIN 2022 INDACO, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Milan, Italy
- January 2021: ’Ricerca Clinica: da dove iniziare’, Webinar AMIETIP - Accademia Medica Infermieristica di Emergenza e Terapia Intensiva Pediatrica, Virtual Meeting
- May 2019: 'I Magnifici Incontri CRUI 2019 - Le Università per la sostenibilità' Position paper for the Round Table number 2B 'Food, health, and well-being', together with Pellegrini, Moret, Parpinel and Barbone
- September 2018: 'Dietary assessment tools', within the course 'Food safety and sustainability', Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan, Italy

Grants (350000 euros)
- 2022: PRIN2022 INDACO – competitive grant – PI with co-PI M. Parpinel
- 2022: Piano Sostegno alla Ricerca, Università degli Studi di Milano – competitive grant – co-PI (PI: M. Dalmartello)
- 2020: Linea 3, Piano di Sostegno alla Ricerca - Seal of Excellence - SoE SEED 2020, Università degli Studi di Milano - competitive grant – co-PI (PI: S. Del Bue)
- 2020: Piano Sostegno alla Ricerca, Università degli Studi di Milano – competitive grants – PI and co-PI (PI: M. Rossi)
- 2020: Piano Sostegno alla Ricerca, Università degli Studi di Milano – competitive grant – PI
- 2017: Fondo Finanziamento Attività di Base di Ricerca FFABR - MIUR – competitive grant - PI
- 2017: Piano Sostegno alla Ricerca, Università degli Studi di Milano – competitive grant – PI
- 2017: Bando Ricerca Indipendente, AIFA – competitive grant –Team member in charge of the statistical analysis

Publication Metrics
SCOPUS: Number of publications: 93 – H-index: 33 – Average citations per item: 29.79
WOS: Number of publications: 94 – H-index: 31 – Average citations per item: 26.13
Average Impact Factor (IF) per publication (86 papers): 4.939
Percentage of papers as first, second, corresponding, or last author: 75%
Percentage of papers in the first or second quartiles: 83% (First: 43%, second: 40%)

Research Interests and Summary of Major Contributions
My research activities are primarily focused on nutritional epidemiology. In particular, I have investigated the role of dietary habits (foods, nutrients, and dietary patterns), lifestyle behaviors (including smoking and alcohol consumption), and other determinants (such as family history of cancer and genomics), as well as their interactions, in cancer etiology. In this field, I have combined rigorous statistical methodologies with clear epidemiological interpretation. To address longstanding methodological challenges in epidemiology more effectively, I have adapted and promoted several innovative statistical approaches, including frequentist and Bayesian multi-study factor analysis to derive dietary patterns, and spline regression models, to tackle nonlinearities in risk factors. My involvement in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL) has enabled me to investigate dietary patterns in underrepresented populations using advanced statistical methods. I have also worked extensively on systematic reviews, meta-analyses, pooled analyses, and, more broadly, on the integration of information from multiple data sources. My interest in pooled analyses began in 2008 through a European fellowship (ECNIS) that provided access to the INHANCE dataset. Since then, I have played an active role in the INHANCE Consortium, contributing as first, last, or corresponding author to 11 publications out of a total of 16 consortium papers. I have also combined my extensive and internationally recognized expertise in the analysis of dietary data derived from traditional dietary assessment tools with an emerging expertise in image-based deep learning-driven tools.

Research Collaborations (National and International)
In the following collaborations, I’m an active member, proposing subprojects and writing papers as a leading author:
- INHANCE Consortium (43 studies worldwide): diet, smoking, and alcohol in the etiology of head and neck cancer
- World Workshop on Oral Medicine VIII, section head with Pedro Diz Dios on ’The impact of changes in guidance on antibiotic prophylaxis on the Incidence of Infective Endocarditis. A systematic review’
- Machine Learning Clinical Research Group, SISMEC scientific society: machine learning in clinical and epidemiological research
- Dana - Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA (Parmigiani): mixture models in genomics; multi-study factor analysis and its applications
- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Sotres-Alvarez) and Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, USA (Stephenson): dietary patterns in US Latinos
- Brown University, Providence, USA and La Sapienza Roma (De Vito): multi-study factor analysis and nonnegative matrix factorization and their applications
- Institut universitaire de medecine sociale et preventive, Lausanne, Svizzera (Levi): cancer risk factors
- Università di Udine, Udine (Parpinel): methodological aspects of dietary assessment in Italy and wordwide
- Università di Trieste, Trieste (Torelli, Pauli, Di Credico): modeling nonlinear associations via splines and nonlinear mixed-effects models
- CRO Aviano (Dal Maso, Polesel, Serraino): nutrients, dietary patterns, smoking, alcohol, and cancer
- Istituto Nazionale Tumori IRCCS Fondazione G. Pascale, Napoli (Augustin, Crispo, Coluccia): glycemic index and load in cancer and deep learning applications for food images
- Politecnico di Milano (Ieva, Paganoni) and Istituto Nazionale Tumori, Milano (Miceli): adaptive designs in clinical trials