Andreas Alfons is an Associate Professor at the Department of Econometrics at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research lies on the intersection of statistics, machine learning, and psychometrics, with an emphasis on data-driven regularization techniques as well as methods that are robust to outliers and deviations from model assumptions. He is an author and maintainer of several software packages for the open-source statistical computing environment R, and a proponent of open and responsible science. This combination of expertise awarded him an NWO Vidi grant for his project "Robust Analysis of (Big) Rating-Scale Data in the Social Sciences".