Rate My Professor Léo Belzile

Léo Belzile is an Associate Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal. He holds an M.Sc. in statistics from McGill University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Belzile joined HEC Montréal as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in June 2024. His research focuses on extreme value analysis, including modelling of conditional univariate and multivariate extremes, likelihood-based inference, hierarchical modelling, and statistical software development. He has contributed to studies on human mortality at extreme ages and longevity, with publications such as “Human mortality at extreme age” in Royal Society Open Science (2021) and “Is There a Cap on Longevity? A Statistical Review” in the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application (2022). Additional recent works include papers on extreme value software and normal approximations for multivariate distributions published in Extremes and the Electronic Journal of Statistics. Belzile serves as a member of the Centre de recherches mathématiques and as an IVADO researcher. He acts as academic supervisor of the Business Intelligence option in the M.Sc. program and has supervised numerous master’s projects and theses. He is co-editing a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Statistics on modern issues in statistics education and is the lead organizer of the Extreme Value Analysis 2027 conference in Montréal. Belzile is currently on sabbatical at the University of Edinburgh.

His applied interests include hydrology and environmental statistics, with expertise in the analysis of rare events and spatial data. Belzile maintains an active publication record in leading statistical journals and contributes to the development of statistical tools and methodologies in extreme value theory.