Professor Georges Dionne receives the Jean Guertin Award
December 1, 2011
The 2011 Jean Guertin Award, HEC Montréal's top prize for teaching excellence, was presented yesterday to Full Professor of Finance Georges Dionne. This tribute came as part of the annual research and teaching award ceremony at the School. In choosing him for this distinction, the jury members emphasized the quality of Professor Dionne’s support for his graduate and postgraduate students and the fact that he has developed a new field of teaching and expertise at the School.
From the time he first arrived at HEC Montréal in 1996, Professor Dionne began developing teaching and research in the field of risk management, and has succeeded so well that today it is a major and distinctive field of expertise at the School. He has designed and developed numerous courses, mainly at the master’s and doctoral levels, helped recruit professors in this field, enriched teaching materials and carried out research work that has done much to support teaching in this area.
In 15 years, Professor Dionne has directed 47 master’s theses and 19 doctoral dissertations, in addition to directing six postdoctoral interns. He is an expert in economics as applied to insurance, finance, health care, transportation and the environment, and is currently directing five theses and eight dissertations. Many of his former students emphasize just how much their professor inspired them and supported them in their funding applications and gave them sage guidance. In fact, many of them have stood out by winning scholarships and prestigious awards themselves, including the award for the best master's thesis and for the best doctoral dissertation, at HEC Montréal, and the PRMIA Risk Management award, the Bank of Canada Award from the Northern Finance Association, the GARP Risk Management Research Award and the award for the Best European Finance Association Doctoral Colloquium Paper, on the international scene. Many have gone on to university careers in finance and risk management.
Professor Dionne is currently the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Risk Management at HEC Montréal and has carried out many research projects with colleagues from the finance, economics and management sciences disciplines, often in association with students he was directing. This collaborative work has led to numerous multidisciplinary articles, theses and dissertations.
Georges Dionne’s renown and influence as a professor and researcher extend well beyond our borders. His Handbook of Insurance, bringing together articles by 35 world-class researchers, is a clear illustration. This reference work has been qualified as an outstanding contribution to the literature of risk and insurance, and is used around the world. It has received three international awards and has now been translated into Chinese. Indeed, Professor Dionne has over 20,500 downloads from the US Social Science Research Network website for all his works.
For his eminent and sustained contribution to the social sciences, Professor Dionne was awarded the Innis-Gérin Medal from the Royal Society of Canada in October. He has been a Fellow of the Society since 2000. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Risk and Insurance and President-elect of the Canadian Economics Association.