Didier Sornette holds the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) since March 2006. He is also Adjunct Professor of Geophysics at IGPP and ESS at UCLA, and Concurrent Professor at the School of Business and Research Center of Systems Engineering at the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), Shanghai. He was previously jointly a Professor of Geophysics at UCLA, Los Angeles California and a Research Director on the theory and prediction of complex systems at the National Center for Scientific Research in France. He is also the Director of Research of Insight Research LLC, a R&D California based company.
Didier Sornette's research interests include the prediction of crises and extreme events in complex systems (with applications to finance, economics, marketing, earthquakes, rupture, biology, medicine); Finance and economics: bubbles and crashes, large risks and tail dependence, theory of derivatives, portfolio optimization, trading strategies, insurance, macro-economics, agent-based models, market microstructures; Physics of complex systems and pattern formation in spatio-temporal structures, dynamical system theory, pattern recognition, self-organized critical, time series analysis and prediction tools.