Gilbert Ritschard


Gilbert Ritschard is a Swiss statistician specialized in quantitative methods for the social sciences and in the analysis of longitudinal data describing life courses. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva. He earned a Ph.D. in Econometrics and Statistics at the University of Geneva in 1979. His main contributions are in sequence analysis. He initiated and led the SNFS project that developed the R toolkit for sequence analysis. He is one of the founders of the , which he served as first president.

Scholarly career

Gilbert Ritschard graduated in 1973 in quantitative economics, earned a diploma in econometrics in 1975, and his Ph.D. in econometrics and statistics in 1979, all at the Department of Econometrics of the University of Geneva. In his doctoral dissertation titled , he developed powerful algorithms for solving qualitative systems of linear equations, i.e., systems where only the sign of the coefficients are known. Such qualitative systems are of special interest in comparative static analysis. During his time as a student, he served as teaching and research assistant at the Department of Econometrics.
After his Ph.D., Gilbert Ritschard worked during a few months at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development where he participated at the development of a large-scale economic model He then spent one year as professor at the Department of Economics of the Université du Québec à Montréal before returning to Geneva as maître-assistant in statistics. In 1986 he was nominated as associate professor of quantitative methods for the social sciences and was promoted as full professor in 1994. Gilbert Ritschard taught as visiting professor in Fribourg, Lausanne, Toronto, and Lyon He was one of the promoters of the where he led the quantitative group from 2011 to 2018.
Along his career, his research interest first moved from econometrics and mathematical economics to social statistics, data mining and machine learning, and later to demography and life course analysis. A continuous salient characteristic of Gilbert Ritschard's research is interdisciplinarity as shown by his multiple collaborations with, among others, computer scientists, demographers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists.
Selected scholarly works: