Rieger is Professor of Banking and Finance at the University of Trier, Germany, since 2010, and Director of the Confucius Institute of the University of Trier since 2018. Since 2019, he is core member of the research group "Quantitative Finance and Risk Analysis", and project leader of the research cluster "Globalization and Re-Nationalization," both financed by the research initiative of the state of Rheinland-Pfalz. Rieger studied mathematics at University of Konstanz from 1993 to 1998, and obtained a PhD at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, in 2001, under the supervision of Prof. Stefan Müller. He worked as research scholar and postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, Scuola Normale Superiore, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich.