Welcome!
I am mathematician working at the interface of mathematical statistics and its applications in bioscience engineering. During my career, I’ve been working with engineers from a variety of disciplines ranging from bioscience engineering towards biomedical and industrial engineering.
Currently, I am an associate professor at Ghent University in the department of data analysis and mathematical modelling where I head the research group BIOSTAT. Our department is part of the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering and is situated at campus Coupure, near the city centre of Ghent.
Research interests
My research is centered around the modelling and analysis of spatio-temporal data. Recent work has centered on point processes, latent variable modeling for spatio-temporal data, spatio-temporal sampling design, and extreme value theory. These developments are driven by environmental challenges in climate and biodiversity research, as well as industrial applications, including the food industry. Previous work also encompasses applications in health informatics.
More information about my research can be found at the group page and in the selected publication below.
Education and professional experience
I am holding a MSc in Mathematics from KU Leuven (Belgium, 2003) and a PhD in mathematics from Hasselt University (Belgium, 2007). Previously to my current position, I was a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford.
Selected publications
[5] Van Eupen, C., Maes, D., Heremans, S., Swinnen, K., Somers, B., and Luca, S. (2024). Integrating citizen science and multispectral satellite data for multiscale habitat management. Biodiversity and Conservation. 33, 1479-1501.
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[4] Steyn, M., Wet, T. de, De Baets, B., and Luca, S. (2023). A Nearest Neighbor Open-set Classifier on Excesses of Distance Ratios. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 32(1), 319-328.
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[3] Luca, S., Vandercappellen, J., and Claes, J. (2020). A web-based tool to design and analyze single- and double-stage acceptance sampling plans. Quality Engineering. 32(1), 58-74.
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[2] Luca, S., Pimentel, M. F., Watkinson, P., and Clifton, D. (2018). Point process models for novelty detection on spatial point patterns and their extremes. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. 125, 86-103.
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[1] Luca, S., Clifton, D., and Vanrumste, B. (2016). One-class classification of point patterns of extremes. Journal of Machine Learning Research. 17(191), 1-21.
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