On December 4^th, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction, and Management (Risks-X) Visiting Chair Professor and Dean Didier Sornette was elected as a full member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (Schweizerische Akademie der Technischen Wissenschaften, or SATW), in recognition of his “groundbreaking and globally recognized work on the characterization and prediction of rare extreme events and bubble formation in technology and society.”

Didier Sornette joined SUSTech in July 2019 and leads the Risks-X Institute with the Department of Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) Head Chen Xiaofei. The Institute was established by the signing of an MoU between SUSTech President Chen Shiyi and ETH Zürich President Joël Mesot at a ceremony in June 2019.

Under the terms of the MoU, the Institute was established by both the Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies at SUSTech and Department of Management, Technology and Economics (D-MTEC). The Institute is committed to building a revolutionary dynamic risk management platform, to real-time and dynamically monitor extreme risks in various system applications, simulate future scenarios, analyze and predict risk trends, and help our society to have strong resilience and improve social responsibility.

Professor Didier Sornette is the director and chair professor at the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks in the D-MTEC, ETH Zürich . He is also a professor of finance at the Swiss Finance Institute, a professor associated with both the Department of Physics and the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zürich. Professor Sornette is a world-class expert in complex systems and extreme risk management, using rigorous data-driven statistical analysis methods to identify, control and predict system instability and extreme events, with applications to all domains of science and practice, including earthquake predictions, financial bubbles and crashes, nuclear risk, cyber risk, social networks, medical sciences. He is particularly famous for his research on the “financial bubble,” and he has successfully predicted many market regime shifts including the three major Chinese stock market crashes in 2007, 2009, and 2015.

Professor Sornette has published more than 800 papers in international journals, published 10 monographs, and his Google H-index citation index reached 101. He has also served as an expert advisor to several world-renowned aerospace companies, banks, investment, and reinsurance companies. His positions have included the chief risk advisor of Bank of America, the expert advisor & project leader of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Scientific Board member of the SCOR Corporate Foundation for Science.