Sebastian Engelke

Full Professor of Statistics
Research Center for Statistics, University of Geneva
Boulevard du Pont d’Arve 40
1205 Geneva, Switzerland
Email: firstname.lastname@unige.ch

Education & Work

2025 –
  1. Full Professor at Research Institute for Statistics and Information Science , University of Geneva.
2021 – 2025
  1. Associate Professor at Research Center for Statistics, University of Geneva.
2018 – 2021
  1. Assistant Professor at Research Center for Statistics, University of Geneva.
2018 – 2019
  1. Visiting Professor at Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto.
2015 – 2018
  1. SNSF Ambizione Research Fellow at EPFL. Project: Risk and Complex Events: from Probability to Applications.
2013 – 2015
  1. Senior Researcher and Lecturer at Chair of Statistics, EPFL and Department of Actuarial Science, University of Lausanne.
2009 – 2013
  1. PhD (summa cum laude) as fellow of Deutsche Telekom Foundation at University of Göttingen.
2004 – 2009
  1. Studies in Mathematics at University of Göttingen and UC Berkeley.

Awards & Grants

2026
  1. Researcher-Sciencepreneur Collaboration Grant from the Swiss Leading House for Africa to install 30 community-operated weather stations across South Africa and feed AI forecasts, together with AfriNet.
2026
  1. Soutien Grant "EXTREME-AI: Enhancing AI Weather Forecasting through Statistical and Extreme-Value Extrapolation" from the Fondation pour l’Université de Genève.
2026
  1. Principal Investigator in the Grand Projet "AI Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery (FUNDIS)" from the Fondation pour l’Université de Genève.
2026
  1. Principal Investigator in the SNSF NCCR CLIM+ on climate extremes.
2026
  1. SNSF Grant for Scientific Conferences; Climate Informatics 2026 Conference (co-chair together with Tom Beucler).
2025
  1. Pro Helvetia Art+ Grant “Devant l’orage” with Swiss writer and artist Thierry Raboud on visualization and communication of climate change.
2024
  1. Selected for Visiting Scholars Program at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne.
2023
  1. Gumbel lecture at the German Statistical Week.
2021
  1. Lambert Award of the Swiss Statistical Society.
2020 – 2025
  1. SNSF Eccellenza grant on "Graph structures, sparsity and high-dimensional inference for extremes"; personal career grant over 5 years.
2019
  1. Fields Research Fellowship for a three-month stay at The Fields Institute in Toronto.
2019
  1. Honourable mention in Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award 2019.
2019
  1. Grant of the Green Leaves Education Foundation for a 8-month stay of PhD student Edossa Merga (Hawassa University, Ethiopia) in Geneva.
2015 – 2018
  1. SNSF Ambizione Research Fellowship; personal career grant over 3 years.
2017
  1. SNSF Grant for Scientific Conferences; Workshop on Risk Quantification and Extreme Values in Applications.
2016
  1. ECI Award for Best Presentation; 9th ERCIM Conference in Seville, Spain.
2013
  1. Dissertation prize; Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Göttingen.
2009 – 2012
  1. Fellowship of Deutsche Telekom Foundation; PhD grant over 3 years.
2007 – 2008
  1. Education Abroad Program; Scholarship for tuition at University of California, Berkeley.

Conference organization

2026
  1. Climate Informatics 2026 Conference; co-chair together with Tom Beucler.
2025
  1. Extreme Value Analysis Conference in Chapel Hill; Chair of the Scientific Committee.
2024
  1. Workshop on Causality in Extremes and two-day PhD school; together with Gloria Buritica and Jonas Peters.
2024
  1. Bernoulli-IMS World Congress Pre-Meeting for Young Researchers; responsible from Bernoulli Society.
2020 – 2022
  1. Winter and Summer CUSO doctoral school (every year); responsible as Program Director.
2019
  1. Workshop on Causality and Extremes (jointly with Valérie Chavez-Demoulin, Anthony C. Davison and Philippe Naveau), EPFL, Switzerland.
2017
  1. Workshop on Risk Quantification and Extreme Values in Applications (jointly with Valérie Chavez-Demoulin and Anthony C. Davison), EPFL, Switzerland.
  2. Winter school on Recent Advances in Extremes (jointly with Léo Belzile and Anthony C. Davison), EPFL, Switzerland.

Plenary Talks

2026
  1. Discrete Laplacians 2026 workshop at MPI-CBG, Dresden, Germany. Topic: TBA.
  2. PGM2026 Probabilistic Graphical Models 2026, Valencia, Spain. Topic: TBA.
  3. EXALT Workshop 2026 on Learning Spatio-Temporal Climate Extremes, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Topic: AI weather forecasting: assessing extrapolation and physical consistency.
2025
  1. Statistics and Data Science for Climate and Weather Extremes, Karlsruhe, Germany. Topic: “Statistical extrapolation and applications to AI weather forecasting”.
  2. Nexus Lecture at the School of Mathematics & Statistics, UNSW, Sydney, Australia. Topic: “Extrapolation in Machine Learning and AI Weather Forecasting”.
2023
  1. Gumbel Lecture at German Statistical Week, Dortmund, Germany. Topic: “Machine learning beyond the data range: an extreme value perspective”.
2021
  1. Lambert Award Lecture at the Swiss Statistics Meeting, Lugano, Switzerland. Topic: “Graph structures, sparsity and high-dimensional inference for extremes”.
2020
  1. Discussion meeting at the Royal Statistical Society, London, UK [video]. Discussion paper “Graphical models for extremes”.
2019
  1. 9th Climate Informatics Conference, Paris, France. Topic: “Graphical models and causality for extreme events”.

Invited Talks

2026
  1. European Meeting of Statisticians, Lugano, Switzerland.
  2. Generative AI Modelling for Extreme Events, Bologna, Italy.
  3. EGU General Assembly, Vienna, Austria.
  4. Statistics Seminar, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
  5. Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
  6. Statistics Seminar, Imperial College London, London, UK.
2025
  1. MeteoSchweiz, Zurich, Switzerland.
  2. MDS Seminar, University of Twente, Twente, The Netherlands.
2024
  1. IMS International Conference on Statistics and Data Science, Nice, France.
  2. Eurandom Workshop, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
  3. 11th Bernoulli-IMS World Congress, Bochum, Germany.
  4. Oberwolfach Workshop, Oberwolfach, Germany.
  5. UNIGE Data Science Day, Geneva, Switzerland.
  6. 15th International Meeting on Statistical Climatology, Toulouse, France.
  7. 5th International Workshop on Statistical Analyses of Multi-Outcome Data, Salzburg, Austria.
  8. BIRS-IMAG workshop, Granada, Spain.
  9. EGU General Assembly (virtual).
  10. MAD/Statistics Seminar, Toulouse School of Economics, Toulouse, France.
  11. Swiss Data Science Center Seminar (virtual).
  12. UNSW Seminar, Sydney, Australia (virtual).
  13. UFZ Seminar, Leipzig, Germany.
2023
  1. COSMOSTATS, Asiago, Italy.
  2. 13th Conference on Extreme Value Analysis (virtual).
  3. One World YoungStatS Webinar, Discussant (virtual).
  4. MétéoSuisse, Payerne, Switzerland.
  5. ISOR Colloquium, Vienna, Austria.
  6. Seminar in Mathematics, Physics & Machine Learning, Lisbon, Portugal (virtual).
2022
  1. CMStatistics, London, UK (virtual).
  2. RSS International Conference, Aberdeen, UK.
  3. ICSA Canada Chapter Symposium, Banff, Canada.
  4. BIRS Workshop, Kelowna, Canada.
  5. Workshop on Causality, Castasegna, Switzerland.
  6. SIAM Conference on Uncertainty Quantification (virtual).
  7. Weather Extremes and Climate Change, Paris, France (virtual).
  8. EVTA Seminar, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
  9. Statistics Seminar at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  10. Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
  11. Probability and Financial Mathematics Seminar, University of Leeds (virtual).
  12. Seminar at University of Edinburgh (virtual).
2021
  1. CMStatistics (virtual).
  2. Statistische Woche, Kiel, Germany (virtual).
  3. Pacific Causal Inference Conference, Beijing, China (virtual).
  4. 12th Conference on Extreme Value Analysis, Edinburgh, UK (virtual).
  5. CRG KAUST workshop, Saudi Arabia (virtual).
  6. Southampton Statistical Sciences Institute, Southampton, UK (virtual).
  7. Seminar at University of Paris-Saclay, Paris, France (virtual).
  8. IEE Research Day, Geneva, Switzerland.
  9. Research Training Group on High Dimensional Probability, Bochum, Germany (virtual).
  10. One World Extremes Seminar (virtual).
2020
  1. Royal Statistical Society discussion meeting, London, UK.
  2. Probability and Statistics Seminar, Lisbon, Portugal (virtual).
  3. Department of Statistics, Columbia University, New York, USA (virtual).
  4. ESSEC Business School, Paris, France (virtual).
2019
  1. Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, Canada.
  2. Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
  3. Department of Mathmatics and Statistics, University of Guelph, Canada.
  4. Department of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences, University of Waterloo, Canada.
  5. Department of Mathematics, UQA Montreal, Canada.
  6. Plenary speaker at Climate Informatics Conference in Paris, France.
  7. Lecturer at Training School on Statistical Modelling of Compound Events, Como, Italy.
  8. ISI World Statistics Congress, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
  9. 11th Conference on Extreme Value Analysis, Zagreb, Croatia.
  10. Oberwolfach Workshop on Foundations and New Horizons for Causal Inference, Oberwolfach, Germany.
  11. Colloquium on Mathematical Statistics and Stochastic Processes, Hamburg, Germany.
  12. Workshop on Extremal Trends in Weather, Gregynog, UK.
  13. Department of Economic Policy, Universita Cattolica, Milan, Italy.
  14. Workshop on Assessment of ensemble forecasts, Aussois CNRS center, France.
2018
  1. GERAD Seminar, Montreal, Canada.
  2. Data, Models and Statistical Inference, workshop in honour of Anthony C. Davison, EPFL, Switzerland.
  3. Self-Similarity, Long-Range Dependence and Extremes, Casa Matemática Oaxaca, Mexico.
  4. Rare Events, Extremes and Machine Learning Workshop, Paris, France.
  5. 5th British-German Frontiers of Science Symposium, Royal Society at the De Vere Wotton House, Dorking, UK.
  6. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Newcastle, UK.
  7. Research Center for Statistics, Geneva, Switzerland.
  8. Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada.
  9. Applied Probability and Risk Seminar, Columbia University, New York, USA.
2017
  1. 10th ERCIM Conference, London, UK.
  2. Modern Statistics for Complex Data Structures, KAUST, Saudi Arabia.
  3. 10th Conference on Extreme Value Analysis, Delft, Netherlands.
  4. IDEA Workshop, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
  5. Swiss Statistics Seminar, Bern, Switzerland.
  6. Thiele Seminar, Aarhus University, Denmark.
  7. RiskLab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
  8. Seminar for Statistics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
  9. Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris 6), France.
  10. Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada.
  11. Department of Mathematical Science, Chalmers University, Sweden.
2016
  1. 9th ERCIM Conference, Sevilla, Spain.
  2. Workshop on Conditional Independence Structures and Extremes, Munich, Germany.
  3. German Statistical Week, Augsburg, Germany.
  4. Workshop on Extremes and Risks in Higher Dimensions, Lorentz Center, Leiden, Netherlands.
  5. 4th IMS-APR Meeting, Hong Kong.
  6. Uncertainty Modeling in the Analysis of Weather, Climate and Hydrological Extremes, Banff Research Station, Canada.
  7. Workshop on Dependence, Stability and Extremes, Fields Institute, Toronto, Canada.
  8. Research Center for Statistics, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
  9. Risk Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
  10. Institute of Statistics, LMU München, Germany.
2015
  1. 8th ERCIM Conference, London, UK.
  2. 9th Conference on Extreme Value Analysis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
  3. Department of Biostatistics and Spatial Processes, INRA Avignon, France.
  4. Institute of Stochastics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany.
  5. Laboratoire de Mathématiques, Université de Franche-Comté, France
2014
  1. 7th ERCIM Conference, Pisa, Italy.
  2. Workshop on High-dimensional and Multivariate Extremes, Bristol, UK.
  3. 2nd Conference of the International Society for Nonparametric Statistics, Cadiz, Spain.
  4. Institute of Statistics, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
  5. Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science, Universität Bern, Switzerland.
  6. School of Business Informatics and Mathematics, Universität Mannheim, Germany.
  7. Institute of Financial and Insurance Sciences, University of Lyon, France