UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Aleksandra "Seša" Slavković, professor of statistics and public health sciences, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Data Privacy and Confidentiality, and associate dean for research in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State, has been honored with the Links Lecture Award by the American Statistical Association (ASA).
The Links Lecture Award was created in 2017 to honor the significant contributions of Constance Citro, Robert Groves, and Fritz Scheuren, three pioneers who advanced the U.S. federal statistical system’s ability to meet growing data demands. Each year, the award recognizes an individual who has made a significant contribution to advancing official statistics — those published by government agencies — and whose work and vision offer the promise to advance the role of official statistics in addressing critical data needs.
“Seša's recognition with this award is a testament to her years of groundbreaking work on statistics for social and public policy, including important research on data privacy,” said Nicole Lazar, department head and professor of statistics. “Seša is an intellectual leader in our profession, well-deserving of this honor. We are proud of her accomplishments and congratulate her on being named this year's Links Lecturer.”
Slavković will present the 2025 Links Lecture titled “Praivacy (noun) Pronounced: /ˈprā-və-sē/ Balancing data confidentiality and utility,” virtually on Jan. 23rd, from noon to 1:30 p.m.
Slavković’s research interests include methodological developments in the area of data privacy and confidentiality in the context of small- and large-scale surveys, health, genomic and network data. Her focus is on the interplay of tools from statistics and computer science that leads to formal privacy protection, such as differential privacy, and broad data access that offers guarantees of accurate statistical inference needed to support reliable science and policy. She has recently published a “Handbook of Sharing Confidential Data: Differential Privacy, Secure Multiparty Computation, and Synthetic Data,” jointly with colleagues from statistics and computer sciences.
Slavković has affiliate appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine, and in the number of university institutes and centers such as the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Center for Machine Learning and Applications, and Center for Medical Genomics. She has also held visiting scholar positions at Cornell University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and Utrecht University. In 2018, Slavković was recognized with the Penn State Graduate School Alumni Society Graduate Program Chair Leadership Award. She was named a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2021, a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2018, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute in 2012.
Slavković has held multiple editorial and leadership roles and serves on several advisory committees, including the board of the Society for Privacy and Confidentiality Research, which supports the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality and related initiatives. She recently completed her role as the editor of Statistics and Public Policy and is continuing to serve as its associate editor as well as of the Annals of Applied Statistics and the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality. She previously served as a data-privacy column editor for CHANCE magazine, associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, and chair of the American Statistical Association Privacy and Confidentiality committee and the Social Statistics Section. She currently serves on the OpenDP Advisory Board at Harvard University, and Validation Server Advisory Board at Urban Institute, and she has served on the NORC Advisory Committee on Statistics at the University of Chicago, and on a number of National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committees.
Slavković received a bachelor's degree in psychology at Duquesne University in 1996, a master's degree in human-computer interaction in 1999, and master's and doctoral degrees in statistics, in 2001 and 2004, respectively, from Carnegie Mellon University.