Prof. Didier Sornette

Curriculum Vitae

Didier Sornette

Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks
Department of Management, Technology and Economics (D-MTEC)
ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland

Director of the Financial Crisis Observatory (http://www.er.ethz.ch)

Co-founder of the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Socio-Economic Systems (http://www.ccss.ethz.ch)

Member of the Swiss Finance Institute (http://www.swissfinanceinstitute.ch)

Professor of Physics associated with the Department of Physics (D-PHYS), ETH Zurich (http://www.phys.ethz.ch)
Professor of Geophysics associated with the Department of Earth Sciences (D-ERWD), ETH Zurich (http://www.erdw.ethz.ch/index_EN)

Adjunct Professor of Geophysics at IGPP and ESS at UCLA
(http://www.ess.ucla.edu/faculty/sornette/

Born in Paris, France, 25 June 1957, married, two sons (Paul-Emmanuel and Jaufray)

Education and academic experience

• Graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS Ulm, Paris), in Physical Sciences (1977-81)
• Master thesis at University of Nice (1981)
• Research scientist of the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) (1981-1990)
• PhD and Habilitation at University of Nice in Physical Sciences (1985)
• Post-Doc at Collège de France in the Condensed Matter Laboratory of Prof. P.G. de Gennes (Nobel prize in Physics, 1991) (1985-1986)
• Visiting professor: Canberra, Australia (1984); Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (1986-1990); Santa Barbara, CA (1992).
• Research director at CNRS, France (1990-2006)
• Professor-in-Residence part-time at the Department of Earth and Space Sciences and at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UCLA (January 1996-June 1999)
• Professor at UCLA (July 1999-February 2006); Visiting Professor at UCLA (March 2006-present)
• First SAG Visiting Professor at the Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA; Systems Analysis Group (SAG) (2005-present)
• Professor at ETH Zurich (starting March 2006)
• Concurrent Professor School of Business and Research Center of Systems Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), Shanghai 200237, China (since 2004)
• Professor at ETH Zurich on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks, D-MTEC (since March 2006)
• Professor of Physics associated with the Department of Physics (D-PHYS), ETH Zurich (since 2007)
• Professor of Geophysics associated with the Department of Earth Sciences (D-ERDW), ETH Zurich (since 2007)
• Honorary Professor of the East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China (since 2009)

Industrial Experience

• Director of Research in the X-RS research & development company in Orsay, France (1988-1995)
• Scientific advisor of the technical director of Thomson-Marconi Sonar company (now THALES) in Nice-Sophia Antipolis Technopolis, France (1984-1996)
• Consultant for aerospace industrial companies, banks, investment and reinsurance companies (1991-present)
• Chief risk advisor at Bank of America in charge with supervising the new department on risk control in the Bank (1998 until the fusion with Nationsbank)
• External expert at Los Alamos National Laboratories and leader of the theoretical development in the project on Model Validation in the Nuclear Stewardship program of the USA (2003-present)
• Co-founder and Director of Research at Insight Research LLC, a firm developing alternative quantitative methods for investments, risk measures and asset allocations
• President of the Board of Renaissance Investment Management

Honors and Service

Organized Conferences

• Who's Who in Science and Engineering 1994
• Co-Chairman of IWIF1, the First International Workshop on Intelligence Finance, 13-14 December 2004, Melbourne, Australia
• European secretary of the Mathematical Geophysics Committee of IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) (1994-2000)
• Chairman of the local organizing committee of the 20th International Conference on Mathematical Geophysics of the IUGG, "Complex space-time geophysical structures", 19-25 June 1994, Villefranche-sur-Mer (proceedings edited in a special volume of Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics vol. 2, 1995)
• Co-organiser of the winter school "Scale Invariance and beyond", Les Houches, France, March 1997 (proceedings EDP Sciences and Springer, Berlin 1997)
• Co-chairman of the local organizing committe of the 23th International Conference on Mathematical Geophysics of the IUGG, "Extreme Earth Events", 19-24 June 2000, Villefranche-sur-Mer
• Co-organiser of the CCSS International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, ETH Zurich, June 8-12, 2009 (https://www.soms.ethz.ch/workshop2009/)

Others

• Elected Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation (WIF) (6th February 2004)
• Invited foreign participant to the Center of Excellence Project, Japan, on "Interfaces of Advanced Economic Analysis", Kyoto University, Graduate School of Economics, Faculty of Economics, Kyoto, Japan (since April 2004)
• Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, UK (October 2007-February 2008) (http://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/)
• Honorary Professor of the East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China (since 2009)
• Member of the editorial board of the Society of Economic Science with Heterogeneous Agents (ESHIA) (http://www.es-hia.org) and of its official journal, the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination (JEIC) (Springer, http://www.springer.com/Journal/11403)
• Member of the Global Advisory Board of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (http://www.humiliationstudies.org/)
• Member of the Advisory Board of the Interdisciplinary Centrum for Complex Systems (IZKS) of the University of Bonn, Germany (2006 - present)
• Associate Editor of Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (1994-1995), Journal de Physique I \& II France (1996-1997), European Physical Journal B (1998-2000) and of the Journal of Geophysical Research (Solid Earth) (1997-2000)
• Associate Editor for the Journal of Quantitative Finance (2001-present)
• Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Modern Physics C (computational physics) (2005-present) and of the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination (JEIC) (2006-present)
• Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Terraspace Science and Engineering (IJTSE) published by World Scientific (April 2009-present)
• Member of the Springer Lecture Notes in Physics Editorial Board (2001-present)
• Member of the Springer Series on Synergetics Editorial Board (2001-present)
• Member of the Springer Complexity Programme Editorial Board (January 2007-present)
• Member of the Scientific Committee on Risques-Les Cahiers de l'Assurance, 9 rue d'Enghien, F-75010 Paris, France
• Referee for the National Science Foundation, in Geophysics, Physics and Mathematical Sciences, referee for the UK Research Council, for the Israelian Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and for the French Research Minister, referee of many professional journals such as European Physical Journal, Journal of Physics A, Europhysics Letters, Physics Letters, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review E, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophyiscal Research, Annales Geophysicae, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Acta Acustica, Risk Magazine, Tectonophysics, Bulletin for the Seismological Society of America, International Journal of Modern Physics, Quantitative Finance, etc.
• Membership: American Geophysical Union; American Physical Society; American Association for the Advancement of Science; Seismological Society of America; American Finance Association

Prizes

• Science et Défence French National Award (1985)
• 2000 Research McDonnell award: Studying Complex Systems, the Scientific Prediction of Crises http://www.jsmf.org/grants/d.php?id=2000013
• Risques-Les Echos prize 2002, Predictability of catastrophic events: material rupture, earthquakes, turbulence, financial crashes and human birth, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, V99 SUPP1:2522-2529 (2002 FEB 19)

Teaching and Publications

• Author and co-author of more than 400 research papers in refereed international journals and more than 140 papers in books and conference proceedings; editor of two proceedings of two international conferences
• Author of the textbook "Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences, Chaos, Fractals, Self-organization and Disorder: Concepts and Tools'', 432 pages, 87 figs., 4 tabs (Springer Series in Synergetics, Heidelberg, 2000); SECOND EDITION, 528 pages, 102 figs., 4 tabs, ISBN: 3540407545 ( Springer Series in Synergetics, Heidelberg, 2004)
• Author of the monograph `Why Stock Markets Crash (Critical Events in Complex
  Financial Systems)", Princeton University Press, 464 pages, 165 illustrations, 21 tables, January 2003; translated in Japanese, (PHP February 2004), translated in Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese
• Author (with Y. Malevergne) of the monograph "Extreme Financial Risks (From dependence to risk management)'', (Springer, Heidelberg, 2005)
• Author (with Y. Malevergne and A. Saichev) of the monograph "Theory of Zipf's law and beyond", Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, Volume 632, Springer (November 2009), ISBN: 978-3-642-02945-5
• Invited more than 400 times to present my work in international conferences and Universities worldwide
• Direction of 11 completed PhD thesis (A. Sauron (1990), P. Sebbah (1993), F. Mortessagne (1994), G. Ouillon (1994), A. Johansen (1998), S. de Toro Arias (1998), C. Maveyraud (1998), G. Pommatau (1999), Y. Malevergne (2002), M. Werner (2007), J. Satinover (2008)
• 11 current PhD candidates: S. Hu (pricing of hedge-funds), G. Harras (agent-based models of financial markets), M. Hetzer (models of human cooperation and strong reciprocity), T. Maillart (agent-based models of cyber-risks), W. Yan (stock market predictions), Y. Wang (fault and earthquake networks), J. Wiesinger (computational intelligence and agent-based models of financial markets), A. Huesler (market risks), J. Volk (testing anomalous market returns in real professonal set-up), K. Behfar (multifractal models of financial markets and news impacts as exogenous jumps), Q. Zhang (impact of news an financial markets)
• Direction of 24 Post-Docs: J.V. Andersen (Denmark), P. Cowie (UK), J.-P. Desideri (France), L. Macon (France), F. Mortessagne (France), A. Sauron (France), P. Sebbah (France), C. Strong (USA), H.J. Xu (China), P. Jogi (UCLA), A. Johansen (Denmark), G. Ouillon (France), S. Gluzman (Canada), M. Lee (UCLA); W.-X. Zhou (UCLA), P. O'Brien (UCLA); A. Helmstetter (UCLA), R. Dell'Aquila (ETH Zurich), R. Crane (ETH Zurich), G. Daniel (ETH Zurich), R. Woodard (ETH Zurich), H. Woodard (ETH Zurich), S. Reimann (ETH Zurich), M. Fedorovsky (ETH Zurich)

Research priorities

• The Financial Crisis Observation is a scientific platform aimed at testing and quanitifying rigorously, in a systematic way and on a large scale the hypothesis that financial markets exhibit a degree of inefficiency and a potential for predictability, especially druing regimes when bubbles develop (http://www.er.ethz.ch/fco/index)
• Center for the prediction of social, commercial and marketing success by combining information stemming from the dynamical responses to endogenous versus exogenous shocks of large databases
• Prediction of crises and extreme events in complex systems and risk management, with applications to social systems (financial crashes, recessions, cyber risks) and natural systems (earthquakes, rupture, epileptic seizures, immune system collapse)