Special Topics Seminar

Fabio Caccioli is a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Risk Studies. He also continues to be involved in research activities at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA).

He holds a PhD in Statistical Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste (Italy).

His research mainly focuses on systemic risk and financial stability. Other research interests include complex networks and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. His contribution to the study of systemic risk includes the study of financial contagion due to overlapping portfolios and the study of the impact of derivatives for financial stability.

Andrew Coburn manages the Advisory Board of the Centre for Risk Studies, coordinating the inputs of consumers of research into the Centre’s risk agenda. Andrew is the principal coordinator of the research programme on ‘System Shock’ at the Centre.

Andrew is one of the leading contributors to the creation of the class of catastrophe models that over the past 20 years has come to be an accepted part both of business management in financial services and of public policy making for societal risk. He has extensive experience in developing models and using them for business decision support. Andrew has also provided research inputs into government policy, such as House of Congress legislation on terrorism risk management policy and urban planning for disaster mitigation in Mexico, Metro Manila, and Southern Italy.

Dr Andrew Coburn is a member of the senior management of Risk Management Solutions, the leading provider of catastrophe risk models to the insurance industry.

Roxane Foulser-Piggott is a post-doctoral research associate at the Centre for Risk Studies, working on the vulnerability of the systems of the global economy and the global landscape of risk.

Roxane trained as an earthquake engineer, specialising in vulnerability assessment and post-earthquake damage assessment techniques. She has worked on insurance applications of risk assessment and has published on ground motion modelling and on remote sensing techniques for damage assessment.

Roxane completed her PhD on earthquake ground motion uncertainty at Imperial College London in 2012.

A director of Cambridge Architectural Research, Roxane has research interests in GIS, spatial statistics, structural vulnerability and ground motion modelling.

Scott Kelly is a post-doctoral research associate in the Centre for Risk Studies. He holds research posts in the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) in the Department of Land Economy and the Electricity Policy Research Group in the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. He is a Junior Research Fellow of Darwin College.

At the Centre for Risk Studies Scott leads the research on macroeconomic modelling. Within the centre, macroeconomic models are used to describe the global and regional impacts that occur as a result of different risk scenarios developed as part of the Cambridge Risk Framework. Research includes estimating the economic impact of exogenous shocks and their propagation in global networks. Specific research areas include the analysis of international trade, supply chain analysis, sector analysis and the estimation of supply chain risk.

Prior to joining the Centre for Risk Studies research included modelling the macroeconomic impact of disasters, the economics of infrastructure, complex systems modelling, input output analysis, econometrics, energy systems modelling and sustainable development. Specialising in applied modelling approaches, expertise has been developed in a variety of different statistical techniques such as multiple linear regression, panel methods and structural equation modelling. More recently knowledge has been developed in the application input-output models, social network analysis and agent based models.

Professor Tso-Chien Pan is the Executive Director and Founding Director of Institute of Catastrophe Risk Management (ICRM) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the former Dean of the College of Engineering at NTU. Professor Pan specialises in the analysis and design of structures against dynamic loading. Over the years, he has carried out many research projects in the area of dynamic structural response to shock and blast loading, as well as earthquake excitations. As Founding Director, Professor Pan is leading the development of ICRM, a university-wide research institute, to look into the effects of natural and man-made disasters on the society.

Professor Daniel Ralph’s research interests include risk in business decision making; risk aversion in electricity markets; methods and models for optimisation problems and equilibrium systems. Specific projects undertaken in collaboration with the banking and insurance industry (Catlin, HSBC, ICBC, Lloyd’s, Munich Re, Risk Management Solutions, Swiss Re) cover emerging risk scenarios, financial stress testing and a global ranking of cities by risk exposure. His engagements with other sectors include electricity consultancies (Artelys, LCP), oil and gas (Shell Exploration, Statoil) and retail (BT Retail, Gap) on decision making under high uncertainty. Public service contributions to the UK Cabinet Office, UK Industry and Parliamentary Trust, UK Office of the Government Chief Scientific Advisor, and United Nations World Humanitarian Summit.

Professor Ralph is a member of the Australian Mathematical Society, INFORMS, the Mathematical Optimization Society and SIAM. He was Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Programming (Series B) from 2007-2013 and has served on the editorial boards of Mathematics of Operations Research and the SIAM Journal on Optimization, as well as the SIAM-MPS book series on optimisation.

Following post-doctoral research at Cornell University, Professor Ralph was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Simon’s main activity in the Centre focuses on the Cambridge Risk Framework research programme where he is leading the development of open source technology to support research into how complex global socio economic networks behave under extreme systemic macro shock conditions.

He is leading the development of the Substrate Data project – closely coupled to the framework – a set of business and economic networked data sets that provide an underpinning for the modelling and analysis of value flows and contagion.

In addition, he is leading the Cyber Threat research track.

Originally studying architecture at Cambridge, Simon has spent most of his career in industry, developing software for natural hazards risk. He has worked on risk pricing for primary insurers, catastrophe modelling for reinsurers, and has been involved in placing catastrophe bonds in the capital markets. He has many years of experience in software development, relational databases and geospatial analysis and has worked in a variety of organisations from startups to multinationals.

Andrew Skelton is an affiliate of the Centre for Risk Studies and holds a research post at the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) in the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge.

With the Centre for Risk Studies, Andrew is helping to develop a dataset of the world’s largest enterprises that drive the global economy and their relationships with each other. Particular focus is being given to quantifying supply chain linkages across a network of multinational enterprises to gain insight into the potential impact of a cyber catastrophe scenario.

Andrew is also interested in the role played by major enterprises in driving (and mitigating) environmental impacts through indirect supply chain activities; work that falls at the intersection of economics, environmental science, international business and supply chain management. Previous research has included: the development of an approach for mapping and visualising flows of embodied greenhouse gas emissions through the global economy; the assessment of how different regions, industries and enterprises could mitigate emissions within their international supply chains; and, the development of a computational model for estimating the carbon footprint of a group of enterprises that removes double-counting caused by the presence of enterprises within each other’s supply chains and deals with uncertainty introduced by incomplete information.

Andrew has an earlier background in product design and holds an MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development from the University of Cambridge and an MEng from the University of Durham.

Paul VanderMarck is chief products officer of RMS. In this role, he has overall responsibility for developing the RMS(one) ecosystem. Since joining RMS in 1992, he has played a central role both in the development of RMS’s global catastrophe modelling capabilities as well as in advancing the state of practice for using modelling to manage catastrophe risk. In 2003, Paul was recognised by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute for his contributions to the field of earthquake risk mitigation and management with the Shah Family Innovation Award, and he serves as chairman of the board for Build Change, a non-profit organisation dedicated to reducing deaths, injuries, and economic losses caused by housing collapses due to earthquakes in developing countries. Paul holds a BS in civil engineering and an MS in structural and earthquake engineering, both from Stanford University.

Joshua is a political scientist and co-founder of Cytora, providers of political risk analytics. A key subject matter specialist on geopolitical risk, he assists the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies with the development of stress test scenarios for geopolitical conflict and social unrest. With a background in political science, management and IT consultancy and international development, Joshua is passionate about how new technologies can be applied to the world’s most vexing problems. He co-founded Cytora, where he is head of research. His time in consultancy saw him advise some of the world’s biggest companies such as GlaxoSmithKline while his development work has taken him to Ghana, Sierra Leone, Swaziland and India. Joshua has an MSc in Political Science from University College London and a BA in History from the University of Manchester.