Elena Moltchanova

Biography

Elena Moltchanova is a guest senior research scholar in the Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability Research Group of the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program. She first came to IIASA in 2001 as a participant of the Young Scientists Summer Program where she wrote a paper on image restoration from multiple sources, which was awarded the Michailevich Scholarship. She rejoined the former IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program in July 2014. Her current research tasks include spatio-temporal modeling, numerical simulation methods, Bayesian methods, and natural disaster modeling. She is proficient in a wide range of statistical software and programming languages.

In 2000, she graduated from the Department of Statistics of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, Finland, where she completed her MSc thesis on modeling a mixture of ordinal treatment response and natural response applying a Bayesian approach. In 2005, she received her PhD from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, for her thesis on applications of spatial statistics in epidemiology.

Previously, she worked as a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Helsinki, and as a researcher and statistical consultant at the National Public Health Institute of Finland. She also has a long history of collaboration with IIASA including EU projects such as INSEA and GEOBENE. Since 2011, she has headed the Statistical Consulting Unit at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research interests include Applied Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling, epidemiology of chronic diseases, modeling of extreme and catastrophic events, and forest ecology.

Last update: 02 APR 2025