Marcelo C. Medeiros is Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marcelo has a BA, MSc. and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from PUC-Rio, with an emphasis in Statistics, Optimization and Control Theory. His area of research is econometrics and data science, and he is particularly interested in the intersection between econometric/statistical theory and cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence  tools. He focuses his research both on theoretical developments as well as empirical applications in finance, macroeconomics, forecasting, and the evaluation of public policies, among other areas. Marcelo was elected Fellow of the Society of Financial Econometrics (SoFiE) in 2022 and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory and Methods), the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, the Journal of Financial Econometrics, and the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. Marcelo has published more than 50 papers in international peer-reviewed journals such as, for example, the Annals of Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Econometric Theory, the International Journal of Forecasting, and the Journal of Banking and Finance.  Finally, Marcelo also serves as an external consultant for firms in Brazil and abroad.