Officers

Laurent Ferrara
President

Laurent Ferrara has been full Professor of International Economics at SKEMA Business School since September 2019. He was previously head of the International Macroeconomics Division at the Banque de France in Paris, in charge of the outlook and macroeconomic forecasting for the global economy, as well as global policy issues such as exchange rates, commodities or global imbalances. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Paris School of Economics. He is also research associate at the Centre for Applied Macro Analysis of the Australian National University, as well as at CNRS research unit of the University of Paris Nanterre.

Laurent Ferrara has been elected in July 2024 as President of the International Institute of Forecasters, an international association aiming at bridging the gap between theory and applications in forecasting. He is also member of the Board of Directors of the French Economic Association (AFSE) where he is chairing the French business cycle dating committee. Laurent Ferrara is an associate editor of two leading academic journals: the International Journal of Forecasting and International Economics.

Professor Ferrara holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Paris North (2001) and a Research Habilitation in Economics from the University of Paris 1 – Panthéon – Sorbonne (2007). His academic research mainly focuses on international economics, international finance, macroeconomic forecasting, non-linear econometric modelling and business cycle analysis. He published more than 50 papers in international and national academic journals, chapters in books, as well as 3 books on international macroeconomics, financial forecasting and time series modelling.

Gergely Ganics
Treasurer

Gergely Ganics is a Research Economist at the Bank of Spain. His research focuses on forecasting, macroeconometrics and financial stability. He has published in the International Journal of Forecasting, the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. Gergely has been serving on the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters since May 2023, where he acts as Treasurer since May 2024. Furthermore, he is the Secretary of the MacroFor Section of the IIF. He has given courses on econometrics and forecasting at various universities in Spain (Barcelona School of Economics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Gergely earned his PhD in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2017.

Fernando Cyrino
Secretary

Fernando Cyrino is a Professor and Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering (Operations Research and Time Series) from PUC-Rio in 2013. Prof. Cyrino also serves as Vice President of the Brazilian Operational Research Society (SOBRAPO) and President of The Brazilian Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Production Engineering. He is an Associate Editor for the Production and Forecasting Journals. His research contributions cover the development of forecasting and statistical methods with general applications, but mainly in energy. His publications include articles in Energy Economics, European Journal of Operational Research, International Journal of Forecasting, Production and Operations Management, Business Strategy and the Environment, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, among others. He has accumulated industrial experience from working on various projects in forecasting and operations research, with funding by the industry and governmental agencies.

George Athanasopoulos
Past President

George Athanasopoulos is Professor and Head at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University, Australia. He received his PhD in Econometrics from Monash University in 2007. A large body of his research has a strong focus on forecasting with work published in journals such as: Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, European Journal of Operations Research, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, Journal of Time Series Analysis, and of course the International Journal of Forecasting. His research has also focused on forecasting and modelling tourism demand and has also published in the Journal of Travel Research, Tourism Management and the Annals of Tourism Research. He is Associate Editor for the International Journal of Forecasting and on the Editorial board for the Journal of Travel Research. George has co-authored with Rob J. Hyndman, Forecasting: Principles and Practice a free online textbook which has practitioners, undergraduate and MBA students as its target audience. The book has reached over 50 million page-views, over 25 thousand per day, with 6.5 million users from 209 countries. It is now available in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Greek and Italian.

Directors, At Large

Elaine Deschamps

Elaine Deschamps is Deputy Director of the Washington State Caseload Forecast Council, an independent state agency responsible for producing entitlement forecasts that provide the foundation for 80 percent of the Washington State budget. These forecasts include health care, public education, the criminal justice system, human services, and public assistance programs. Elaine has spent 27 years in public service, previously as Senior Fiscal Analyst for the Washington State Senate Ways and Means Committee, in charge of the low-income health care and public health budgets. She received double majors in political science and economics from the University of Puget Sound, and her MA and PhD in political science from Indiana University. Elaine has published articles in the International Journal of Forecasting and Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. Her interests involve organizational dynamics of forecasting, health care and budget forecasting, judgmental adjustments, and collaborative forecasting. She serves on the Editorial Board of Foresight and has consulted in both the public and private sector, in arenas ranging from low-income health care to supply chain forecasting.

Chris Fry

Chris Fry is Director of Resource Efficiency Data Science at Google, where he leads data science efforts dedicated to driving efficient utilization of Google’s datacenter infrastructure. He has worked in the field of forecasting for over 25 years, and has developed forecasts and built forecasting systems for companies across a wide range of industries including energy, pharmaceuticals, travel, apparel, grocery retail, advertising, and computer systems. Chris served as an advisor on the M5 forecasting competition, contributing to the design of the competition, and helping to bring the competition onto Kaggle. He has a B.S. degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University, and an M.S. degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford.

Ulrich Gunter

Tao Hong

Tao Hong is Associate Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he directs the Big Data Energy Analytics Laboratory (BigDEAL). He is the Founding Chair of IEEE Working Group on Energy Forecasting, General Chair of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition. He is an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Forecasting. Since 2008, he has been providing training and consulting services to hundreds of organizations in the energy industry.

Tim Januschowski

Tim Januschowski is the Director of Pricing Platform at Zalando SE, a fashion e-tail company. His organization delivers millions of prices on the Zalando online presences requiring to solve some of the industries most challenging forecasting problems. Prior professional experience include a position as a Machine Learning Science Manager in Amazon’s AWS AI Labs. He has worked on forecasting since starting his professional career at SAP. At Amazon, he has produced end-to-end solutions for a wide variety of forecasting problems, from demand forecasting to server capacity forecasting. Tim’s personal interests in forecasting span applications, system, algorithm and modeling aspects and the downstream mathematical programming problems. He studied Mathematics at TU Berlin, IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, and Zuse-Institute Berlin and holds a PhD from University College Cork.

Yanfei Kang

Dr. Yanfei Kang is an Associate Professor at the School of Economics and Management of Beihang University and Head of the Department of Quantitative Economics and Business Statistics. She received her PhD degree from Monash University and previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Monash University and Baidu Inc.’s Big Data Group as a senior R&D developer. Yanfei’s research endeavours are primarily focused on tackling large-scale time series forecasting challenges by developing innovative methods in forecast combinations, hierarchical forecasting and intermittent demand forecasting. Her research is published in various academic journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, International Journal of Forecasting, International Journal of Production Research, Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, among others.

Yanfei also has close industrial collaborations, particularly in online retail and energy forecasting. She is currently PI of two NSFC grants, and takes an active part in other grants, including one supported by the National Key Research and Development Program, and one by Alibaba’s Innovative Research Program. She serves as a council member of the Chinese Statistical Education Society, a council member of the Beijing Big Data Association, and an Associate Editor for R Journal. Her team translated Forecasting: Principles and Practice  into Chinese.

Malvina Marchese

Malvina Marchese is a Senior Lecturer in Finance and Academic Program Director of the Finance degrees at Bayes Business School since September 2020. She was previously Head of Risk Management at Shell Oil, in charge of the forecasting outlook and V@R models. She is also invited associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology ( NTNU), where she lectures on financial forecasting and empirical finance. Malvina holds the position of financial forecasting consultant with Maersk Brokers Advisory and CBRE Investment Management. She is an associate editor of Foresight :|The International Journal of Applied Forecasting and of the International Journal of Finance and Economics. She regularly organizes sessions at the CFE-CM Statistics conference and workshops at the International Forecasting Symposium. Malvina holds a PhD in Econometrics( Statistics) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on high dimensional models for volatility and correlations forecasting with applications to commodities, and on fractional integration in volatility modelling.

Anastasios Panagiotelis

Anastasios Panagiotelis is an Associate Professor of Business Analytics at the University of Sydney. He conducts research on the development of novel statistical methodology for the modeling and forecasting of large scale datasets in energy, macroeconomics and online retail. He led the Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Macroeconomic Forecasting in a Big Data World” and has published in a diverse range of top-tier journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Society, Journal of Econometrics, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and International Journal of Forecasting. Anastasios received his PhD from the University of Sydney. He was previously a member of faculty at the Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics at Monash University and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the Technical University of Munich.

Pierre Pinson

Pierre Pinson is the Chair of Data-centric Design Engineering at Imperial College London, Dyson School of Design Engineering. He received his M.Sc. In Applied Mathematics from INSA Toulouse, France, and a Ph.D. from Ecole des Mines de Paris, France. His main research interests are centered around how to generate optimal value from data, especially with focus on forecasting and decision-making. This translates to a strong focus on probabilistic forecasting, forecast verification, high-dimensional modelling, online learning, distributed learning, stochastic optimization and game theory. He has published extensively in high-profile scientific journals in various disciplines, e.g., the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Monthly Weather Review (Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences); Statistical Science, Statistics and Computing, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society C, European Journal of Operational Research (Statistics and Operations Research), various IEEE Transactions, Energy Economics (Energy applications), Nature, Scientific data (Open Data), and obviously the International Journal of Forecasting. He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford (Mathematical Institute), the University of Washington (Department of Statistics), the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Rennes, France). In 2019, he was a Simons fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Cambridge).