Marc G. Genton
- Al-Khawarzmi Distinguished Professor, Statistics
- Principal Investigator, Spatio-Temporal Statistics and Data Science
Professor Genton’s pioneering research on large-scale spatial and temporal data has profoundly affected the field of environmental statistics. He is an expert in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics with applications to environmental problems.
Biography
Al-Khawarizmi Distinguished Professor of the KAUST Statistics Program, Marc G. Genton, is a specialist in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics with environmental applications. His work has revolutionized environmental data science, addressing large-scale problems involving spatial and temporal datasets. To emulate climate model outputs of more than one billion temperature data points, he developed 3-D space-time stochastic generators using spectral methods and fast Fourier transforms.
Genton is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI).
In 2010, he received the El-Shaarawi Award for Excellence from the International Environmetrics Society (TIES) and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) of the American Statistical Association (ASA). In 2017, he was honored with the Wilcoxon Award for Best Applications Paper in Technometrics. He received an ISI Service Award in 2019 and the Georges Matheron Lectureship Award in 2020 from the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences (IAMG).
He led a Gordon Bell Prize finalist team with the ExaGeoStat software at Supercomputing 2022. In 2023, he was awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s (RSS) Barnett Award for his outstanding contributions to environmental statistics. He also received the prestigious 2024 Don Owen Award from the San Antonio Chapter of the American Statistical Association and led a Gordon Bell Prize finalist team in Climate Modeling for the Exascale Climate Emulator at SC24.
In addition to authoring over 300 publications, Genton has edited a book on skew-elliptical distributions and their applications. He has given more than 400 presentations at conferences and universities worldwide.
Genton received his Ph.D. in statistics in 1996 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He also holds an M.S. degree in applied mathematics teaching, earned in 1994 from EPFL.
Before joining KAUST, he held prominent faculty positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), North Carolina State University, the University of Geneva and Texas A&M University.
Research Interests
Professor Genton’s research centers around spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, including the statistical analysis, visualization, modeling, prediction and uncertainty quantification of spatio-temporal data. A wide range of applications can be found in environmental and climate science, renewable energies, geophysics and marine science.
Currently, he is developing high-performance computing tools for spatial statistics and expanding the capabilities of ExaGeoStat, the software developed by his Spatio-Temporal Statistics and Data Science (STSDS) research group and the Extreme Computing Research Center (ECRC).
An in-depth, five-year study of wind energy potential in Saudi Arabia, led by Genton, culminated in a comprehensive plan for developing the Kingdom's future wind energy strategy. With the help of apps and 3-D glasses, he has also demonstrated how virtual reality can help visualize environmental data on smartphones.
Awards and Distinctions
- Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2024
- 2024 Don Owen Award, American Statistical Association's San Antonio Chapter, 2024
- Service Award, ISI for serving as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Stat from January 2015 to December 2017, 2019
- Georges Matheron Lecturer of the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences , 2020
- JRSS-A paper read before the Royal Statistical Society, 2018
- Award for Best 2016 Paper in JABES, 2018
- Wilcoxon Award for Best Applications Paper in Technometrics, 2017
- Fellow: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2012
- ADVANCE Distinguished Lecture: Kansas State University, 2011
- Distinguished Achievement Award: from the Section on Statistics and the Environment (ENVR) of the American Statistical Association (ASA), 2010
- El-Shaarawi Award for Excellence: from the International Environmetrics Society (TIES), 2010
- Fellow: Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), 2010
- Fellow: Royal Statistical Society (RSS), 2009
- Elected: to the International Statistical Institute (ISI), 2008
- Fellow: American Statistical Association (ASA), 2007
- 2024 Finalist for Gordon Bell Prize in Climate Modeling for Exascale Climate Emulator at SC24, SC24, 2024
- 2023 Barnett Award, Royal Statistical Society, UK, 2023
- 2022 Finalist for Gordon Bell Prize with ExaGeoStat Software at SC22, SC22, 2022
- 2018 Award for Best 2016 Paper in JABES, Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics (JABES), 2018
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- Statistics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL, Switzerland, 1996
- Master of Science (M.S.)
- Applied Mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL, Switzerland, 1994
- Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng.)
- Engineer in Applied Mathematics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL, Switzerland, 1992
Course Structure
Professor Marc Genton's Courses