# Frederi Viens

Frederi G. Viens is an American statistician, mathematician, and academic. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice University, a founding member of the Diverse Rotations Improve Valuable Ecosystem Services Project, a senior research contributor to the Sustainability of Agrarian Societies in the Lake Chad Basin initiative, and moderator of the long-term scientific committee for the Seminar on Stochastic Processes conference series.
Viens' primary research areas are probability theory, stochastic processes, quantitative finance, and Bayesian statistics. His research collaboration has focused on different areas, including climate change, agro-ecology, agricultural economics, development economics, nuclear physics, and human medicine. He was named a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department in 2010 and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2013. His work has been published in journals, including Annals of Probability, Annals of Statistics and American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

## Education

Viens earned a Master's degree in Mathematics from the University of California at Irvine and a Master's degree in Pure Mathematics from the University of Paris, both in 1991. He went on to complete his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Irvine in 1996.

## Career

In 1997, Viens became an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of North Texas, holding this post until 2000. In 2000, he joined Purdue University's Departments of Statistics and Mathematics as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor there in 2003 and Professor in 2008. In 2016, he was appointed Professor at Michigan State University's Department of Statistics and Probability. In 2022, he joined Rice University where he has been serving as Full Professor in its Department of Statistics, in the School of Engineering and Computing.
Viens was a Science Advisor for the Bureau of African Affairs at the US State Department from 2010 until 2011. Moreover, between 2015 and 2016, he was appointed Program Director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the US National Science Foundation. He also served as the Chairperson of the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University between 2016 and 2020. At MSU, he served as the Director of the BS Program in Actuarial Science and Quantitative Risk Analysis from 2017 to 2022.

## Research

Viens has conducted research on stochastic processes, focusing on the existence and regularity properties of random processes in the context of stochastic differential equations, evaluated the predictive power of mathematical models to improve the quantification of nuclear binding and the nuclear saturation point, and demonstrated the consistency of statistical estimators in linear and nonlinear stochastic equations with long memory noise. His research in quantitative finance has focused on improving the modeling of risk uncertainty in insurance and estimated stochastic volatility for stock option pricing. His findings have offered insights for managing systemic risk in financial markets and have focused on improving risk management and policymaking in financial sectors. His research in agricultural and developmental economics has advanced mathematical models for estimating economic risks, using Bayesian hierarchical modeling to analyze U.S. agricultural R&D's impact on productivity, assess uncertainties in R&D lag structures, and explore long-term policy implications. He has also collaborated with climate scientists to help reconstruct Planet Earth's global mean surface temperatures over the past two millennia, including principled uncertainty quantification using Bayesian statistics.

## Personal life

Viens is married to Carolyn Johnston, a history professor at Michigan State University. They have a daughter. He and Johnston operate a small-scale, sheep farm in Laingsburg, Michigan, which also received a humane farming grant from the Food Animal Concerns Trust in 2019.

## Awards and honors

* 2010 – Franklin Fellow, U.S. Department of State
* 2013 – Fellow, Institute of Mathematical Statistics
* 2013 – Inaugural College of Science Research Award, Purdue University
* 2021 – IMS Annals Quadfecta Twenty-Three Recognition, Institute of Mathematical Statistics
* 2024 – Wolfson Fellowship Senior Investigator, British Academy