Sebastian Poledna is a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and was a Faculty Member at the Complexity Science Hub.

Sebastian holds double degrees in physics (2005–2011), and in economics and business administration (1999–2003) and has worked as a practitioner in risk management at one of the largest European banks for almost a decade (2007–2015). He obtained his PhD in physics at the University of Vienna in 2016 with a PhD thesis, entitled “Understanding systemic risk in financial networks by methods from statistical mechanics”, advised by Stefan Thurner. During his PhD program he worked as a guest researcher at the University of Oxford (Oxford Martin School) and at the Bank of Mexico (Dirección General de Estabilidad Financiera).

The focus of Sebastian’s research is on financial networks, systemic risk, financial stability and agent-based modeling. He authored several papers in international peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Banking & Finance, the Journal of Financial Stability, Quantitative Finance, and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. He is currently leading a research project, entitled “A big-data approach to systemic risk in very large financial networks”, at IIASA.

Sebastian’s work (especially his suggestion for a systemic risk transaction tax) has generated interest from numerous institutions including the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Mexico (Banco de México), the German regulatory bodies BaFin, the Bundesbank, the German Ministry of Finance, and the European Commission (DG-MARKT). He presented his work at more than 20 international conferences and workshops and has received recognition in both national and international news media such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bloomberg. He has active collaborations with researchers from several central banks and is in close contact with financial practitioners.