At the age of 43, he received the Decoration of Honor in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria in recognition of his outstanding achievements in research. Kurt Hornik, a native of Vienna, studied technical mathematics at TU Wien, where he earned his doctoral degree in 1987.

In 1988, he started working as an assistant professor at TU Wien, and in 1990, he became associate professor. In 2004, Hornik was appointed full professor of statistics and mathematics at WU, where he also became head of the Institute for Statistics and Mathematics and the Research Institute for Computational Methods. Kurt Hornik’s main research interests include statistical computing, statistical and machine learning, and quantitative risk management.

One of his outstanding research achievements is the co-development of the world-renowned, state-of-the-art programming language R. Over 15,000 additional packages have been developed for R, and to this day, the central R server is still located at WU, thanks to Kurt Hornik. Professor Hornik has published his work in high-profile international journals such as the Journal of Statistical Software, the Journal of Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, and Annals of Applied Statistics.

In his Researcher of the Month video, Kurt Hornik provides insights into his research on the modelling of preferences, which has been used for practical applications by the European Central bank.