She is a professor of statistics in the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, associated with the KU Research Centre for Operations Research and Business Statistics (ORSTAT).
She is known for developing, with Nils Lid Hjort, the focused information criterion for model selection.
In 1999, she earned a master's degree in biostatistics and Ph.D. in mathematics, at Limburgs Universitair Centrum (now the University of Hasselt);[3] her dissertation, supervised by Marc Aerts, was Smoothing Techniques and Bootstrap Methods for Multiparameter Likelihood.
She joined the KU Leuven faculty in 2004, and was promoted to full professor there in 2012.
[3] In 2004, Claeskens won the Noether Young Scholar Award of the American Statistical Association.