Francesca Lazzeri, Ph.D., is Principal Group Director of Data and Applied AI Science at Microsoft, where she leads a multidisciplinary organization of AI researchers, data applied scientists, and machine learning engineers. Her core strengths include building interpretability and explainability tools for safe and trustworthy AI, fine-tuning foundation models with rigorous evaluation and experimentation, advanced prompt engineering, MLOps and AIOps integration, production-grade AI governance with full-stack observability.

Francesca is also Advisor and Lecturer for MIT’s "Break Through Tech AI" program, where she designs and delivers hands-on modules on LLM evaluation methodologies, covering prompt-engineering assessments, fairness and bias measurement, and the development of ethical guidelines for generative AI systems.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Francesca was a Research Fellow at Harvard University (Technology and Operations Management Unit) and taught Python for AI as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University.

She has authored several books, including:

• Machine Learning Governance for Managers (Springer Nature, 2023)
• Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Business and Society (Routledge, 2023)
• Machine Learning for Time Series Forecasting with Python (Wiley, 2020)

She also contributes regularly to journals like O’Reilly, InfoQ, and DZone, and serves as Chief Editor of Data Science at Microsoft, a publication dedicated to practical insights for developers and data scientists.

Francesca is proud to serve on advisory boards for initiatives like Break Through Tech AI (MIT), AI-CUBE project (European Union) and Women in Data Science (Stanford University).

You can connect with her on LinkedIn and Medium.