Frederi G. Viens is a full professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. He pursues a long-standing personal research agenda in probability theory, stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, and in applied probability for insurance mathematics and quantitative finance. Over the past 15 years, he has developed a robust applied statistics research program. Using the power of computational Bayesian statistics, he collaborates on a number of significant projects in climate science, agro-ecology, agricultural economics, development economics, nuclear physics, and human health management.
Prior to joining Rice, he was a full professor at Michigan State University’s Department of Statistics and Probability from 2016 to 2022. There, he served as Department Chair, as Director of Actuarial Science, a professional bachelor’s degree program with strong connections to the Lansing area insurance industry, and as adjunct director of the Center for Statistical Training and Consulting, a university-wide service. While at MSU, he promoted the reach of the Alliance for Africa Partnership in STEM directions, and worked to create a new MS program in Data Science at MSU which started in 2022.
He was a professor of statistics and mathematics at Purdue University from 2000-2015. He worked as program director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA (2015-2016). He served as co-chair for Pure Mathematics for Canada’s National Science and Engineering Research Council (2011-2012). He was a science adviser to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in Washington DC (2010-2011), and held faculty positions in Spain, France, Texas, and Chile, in teaching and research roles.
His distinctions include Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2012), Franklin Fellow of the U.S. State Department (2010), and Fulbright Research Scholar in Villetaneuse, France (2004). Viens is the long-term moderator of the Seminar on Stochastic Processes. He serves on the editorial board of the Annals of Finance and is a senior member of the Risk Modeling Group for the agro-ecology advocacy non-profit Land Core. He is currently the scientific moderator of a transnational research group, headquartered in Nigeria, on the sustainability of agrarian societies in the Lake Chad Basin, a remote region in North Central Africa. He has served as associate editor for several prestigious journals in probability, statistics, and finance. He has organized numerous high-profile international conferences, both in the United States and overseas, and is routinely invited as a sessional and plenary speaker at major topical international conferences. His sources of research support include the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Office of Naval Research, and a private U.S. non-profit.
Viens holds a master's degree in mathematics from the University of California at Irvine, a maîtrise de mathématiques pures from the Université de Paris 7, France, both obtained in 1991, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Irvine in 1996.