About me

I am currently serving as Director of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science of the University of Bern, where I am heading the Uncertainty Quantification and Spatial Statistics Group. My office (009) is located at Alpeneggstrasse 22, 3012 Bern, Switzerland.

In recent months, I spent a substantial part of my time at Isaac Newton Institute (Cambridge, UK), where I have been organizing the programme Representing, calibrating & leveraging prediction uncertainty from statistics to machine learning together with Florence d’Alché-Buc, Judith Rousseau and Richard Wilkinson.

In 2025, I joined the Swiss Academy of Sciences as an elected member, currently being part of the board of the Platform Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics. I am also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (2023-), a member of the ELLIS Society (2024-), and have been a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Swiss Mathematical Society, and the International Association of Mathematical Geology for a number of years.

At the University of Bern, I am also serving on the scientific committee of the Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, where we are setting up a Platform on Statistical Data Science and Machine Learning. Also, I am a member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medecine and the Multidisciplinary Center for Infectious Diseases.

On the editorial side, I am serving as Associate Editor of SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification (2019-), Technometrics (2022-2025), and regularly as Area Chair / Meta-Reviewer for major Machine Learning conferences (e.g., ICML 2025, AISTATS 2025, NeurIPS 2025).

A significant part of my research deals with random field (including in particular Gaussian Process) modelling and adaptive design of experiments, with a focus on Bayesian global optimization and related topics such as Bayesian set estimation. Further interests include design and estimation of covariance kernels and parameters, as well as the theory of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces. From the real-world application side, I have been working with a number of colleagues both from engineering and from geosciences. In recent years, my team and I have collaborated with climate scientists, and now also with colleagues from medecine.

I defended my PhD in Applied Mathematics at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne in 2009. Previous to that, I obtained a double graduate diploma from Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne and Berlin Technical University (2005), a research master’s degree in Applied Mathematics jointly awarded by Jean Monnet University and Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne (2005), and a licence in Mathematics from Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble (2002).

From 2008/2009, I worked as an assistant and a scientific collaborator, respectively in the Institute of Mathematics and the Centre for Hydrogeology and Geothermics (Stochastic Hydrogeology Group headed by Philippe Renard), University of Neuchatel, before starting to work as Senior Assistant (2010) and then Dozent (2014) at the IMSV of the University of Bern.

From September 2015 to May 2020, I worked mainly as a permanent senior researcher at Idiap Research Institute where I founded and headed the Uncertainty Quantification and Optimal Design group. During my last two academic years at Idiap, I lectured at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and participated to the Master in Artificial Intelligence offered by Unidistance and Idiap. I have also held since 2018 a titular professorship at the University of Bern, where I have been employed in several settings between my habilitation in 2014 and my current employment (from August 2021) as a Professor Extraordinarius of Statistical Data Science.