Stat Trek : an interview with Christian Genest

Christian Genest is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Stochastic Dependence Modeling at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. He studied mathematics and statistics at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (BSpSc, 1974), the Université de Montréal (MSc, 1978), and The University of British Columbia (PhD, 1983). Before joining McGill in 2010, he held academic posts at Carnegie Mellon University (1983–84), the University of Waterloo (1984–87), and Université Laval (1987– 2010). Over the years, he also held visiting positions in Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Christian’s primary research focus lies in multivariate analysis, nonparametric statistics, and extreme-value theory. He also collaborates regularly with researchers in insurance, nance, and hydrology. He has published extensively and earned various distinctions for his seminal and widely cited work in dependence modeling. In particular, he received the Statistical Society of Canada Gold Medal for Research in 2011 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015. He has also served the profession in various capacities, e.g., as Director of the Institut des sciences mathématiques du Québec, President of the Statistical Society of Canada, and Editor-in- Chief of The Canadian Journal of Statistics (1998–2000). He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Multivariate Analysis.