Jonas Peters: inaugural lecture
On 30 October, Professor Jonas Peters gave his inaugural lecture entitled: "What happens if? Can we learn from data how ecosystems react to changes?" He has been a professor at the Department since 1 April 2023.
Laudatory speech by Josef Teichmann, Head of Department:
Dear Jonas, dear Rector of ETH Zurich, dear family and friends, dear ladies and gentlemen
It is my great pleasure to welcome you all to Jonas Peters inaugural lecture.
Jonas Peters, born in 1984, grew up in the North of Germany where he attended the Burg-Gymnasium Bad Bentheim. He studied mathematics in Heidelberg and Cambridge and completed his studies in 2012 with a doctoral thesis on causality at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (formerly, the group was part of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics) as well as at ETH Zurich. The thesis was supervised by Peter Bühlmann, Dominik Janzing and Bernhard Schölkopf and was awarded the ETH Silver Medal.
Jonas spent his postdoctoral years in Zurich, Berkeley, Pittsburgh and Tübingen before he became an associate professor of statistics at the University of Copenhagen in 2016 and a professor in 2019. On 1 April 2023, Jonas took his position as a professor of statistics at ETH Zurich.
Jonas has received numerous awards for his work for instance the Silver Medal of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2021 or the Guy Medal in Bronze awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in 2019. He was also a Marie Curie fellow from 2013 to 2015.
Jonas Peters' research is located in the beautiful area of causality where one tries to learn causal structures either from purely observational data or from a combination of observational and interventional data. His research on causality, theoretical as well as practical, is crucial in our times where data-driven modelling is everywhere and has spectacular successes. This concept of causality is very nicely explained in an ETH video where Jonas' love for cello music also plays an important role.
We are proud of our universalist perspective on mathematics here at the department where mathematics ranges – in contrast to many other institutions – from algebraic geometry, number theory, partial differential equations via statistics to numerics or mathematical finance, just to name a few. This mutual inspiration is one of the pillars of success of our department and I am personally very much looking forward to causality in finance with Jonas in the hallways of the department.
Jonas is an enthusiastic applied mathematician who loves theory as much as impactful implications and he loves – as he told me personally – to teach on those findings. Now we are very happy to welcome Jonas Peters at the department and we are looking forward to his inaugural lecture.