Federica Zoe Ricci

Assistant Professor of Statistics
Swarthmore College

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Preserving the spirit of childhood for life means preserving the curiosity of learning, the pleasure to understand, the desire to communicate. (Bruno Munari)

Hi there! Starting from August 2025 I will be an Assistant Professor of Statistics (tenure-track) at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Swarthmore College. I received my PhD in Statistics from UC Irvine, working with Erik Sudderth (UCI) and Michele Guindani (UCLA). I combine Bayesian statistics and machine learning approaches to develop statistical models for structured data and scalable computational methods. I was supported with a fellowship of the HPI Research Center in Machine Learning and Data Science at UCI .

I am very passionate about statistics and data science education. I work on a variety of teaching and research projects in this area, including on formative feedback to data science assignments, gamification, scientific writing and Bayesian thinking in STEM.

Outside of academia, I enjoy spending time in nature, playing board games and organizing road trips.

My pronouns are she/her and this is how my name is pronounced: