Christian Genest
Christian Genest is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University, where he held a Canada Research Chair between 2011 and 2015. He is the author of numerous research papers in multivariate analysis, nonparametric statistics, extreme-value theory, and multiple-criteria decision analysis.
He is a recipient of the Statistical Society of Canada's Gold Medal for Research and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015.
Contributions
Genest is best known for developing models and statistical inference techniques for studying the dependence between variables through the concept of copula. He has designed, among others, various techniques for selecting, estimating and validating copula-based models through rank-based methods. His methodological contributions in multivariate analysis and extreme-value theory found numerous practical applications in finance, insurance, and hydrology.Throughout his career, Genest also made significant contributions to the development of techniques for the reconciliation and use of expert opinions and pairwise comparison methods used to establish priorities in multiple-criteria decision analysis. He is the author or co-author of over 380 scientific publications, about half of which appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Part of his work is also concerned with the history of statistics and scientometrics. Christian Genest has given over 360 invited talks, including 90+ presentations for a general audience.
Birthplace and education
Christian Genest was born on January 11, 1957, in Chicoutimi. He was trained as a mathematician at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and at the Université de Montréal before completing graduate studies in statistics at the University of British Columbia. His thesis, entitled "Towards a Consensus of Opinion", was written under the supervision of James V. Zidek and earned him the Pierre Robillard Award from the Statistical Society of Canada in 1984.Academic career
After completing his PhD, Christian Genest was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983–84. From 1984 to 1987, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. He was then hired by Université Laval, where he was promoted to the ranks of associate in 1989 and professor in 1993. He joined McGill University in 2010, where he held a Canada Research Chair in Stochastic Dependence Modeling from 2011 to 2025.Honors and prizes
Christian Genest was the first recipient of the CRM-SSC Prize in 1999. He received the SUMMA Research Award from Université Laval the same year. In 2011, the Statistical Society of Canada awarded him its most prestigious distinction, the gold medal, "in recognition of his remarkable contributions to multivariate analysis and nonparametric statistics, notably through the development of models and methods of inference for studying stochastic dependence, synthesizing expert judgments and multi-criteria decision making, as well as for his applications thereof in various fields such as insurance, finance, and hydrology." Christian Genest is a fellow of the American Statistical Association since 1996, a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics since 1997, and an honorary member of the Association des statisticiennes et statisticiens du Québec since 2012.He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015 and received a Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2019. He was the first statistician to receive the John L. Synge Award in 2020 and the CRM-Fields-PIMS prize in 2023. In 2024, he was awarded the Parzen Prize.