Special Topics Seminar

Nick Beecroft is Manager, Emerging Risks and Research at Lloyd’s. His team is responsible for providing foresight and actionable analysis on emerging risks, working with partners in the research community to provide forward-looking insight and to reduce uncertainty concerning new and rapidly changing risks. Key outputs are thought leadership reports, scenarios for stress-testing and insight to inform innovation strategy. Before joining Lloyd’s, Nick spent the majority of his career as an Intelligence Officer in the Royal Air Force. Appointments included attachments to central government in a counter-terrorism role and to the British Army, where he was responsible for operational planning and mentoring of local forces on deployed operations.

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.

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.

Eireann Leverett has studied psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and computer security at various times in his life. He holds a BEng from Edinburgh University and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Advanced Computer Science. He still enjoys punting at Darwin College when he has the time.

At the Centre for Risk Studies his research focuses upon technological disasters and the economic impacts of computer security failures or accidents. He has experience of compromising the security of organisations, and assisting them to improve their security postures through a variety of short and long term methods. He is interested in computer security at scale, security economics, systems security, incident response, critical infrastructure protection, safety, firmware signing, exploit markets, vulnerability management, quality assurance, indicators of compromise, modelling, networks, risk, visualisations, and zero knowledge proofs. He is a frequent public speaker on these subjects.

He is on a research sabbatical from IOActive where he is a penetration tester and researcher in their Industrial Control Systems Security practice.

Duncan Needham is an associate of the Centre for Risk Studies, Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, and a Research Fellow at Darwin College.

After completing his first degree at the London School of Economics, and a Masters at Cass Business School in Shipping, Trade and Finance, Duncan worked at Credit Suisse Financial Products and JP Morgan, where he ran the banks and financials desk, trading bonds and credit default swaps. He then spent four years running Cairn Capital’s Investment Grade Collateralised Debt Obligation business, before returning to academia in 2008 to complete his MPhil in Economic History.

Duncan recently completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. This will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014 as UK Monetary Policy from Devaluation to Thatcher, 1967-82.

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 start-ups to multinationals.

Kimmo Soramäki is the Founder and CEO of Financial Network Analytics and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Network Theory in Finance. Before founding FNA in 2010, he worked for 15 years in policy-making, advisory and multidisciplinary research roles at several central banks – including the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His research has focused on the interconnectedness of financial systems and on systemic risk. He has published in academic journals in the areas of economics, statistical mechanics and operations research and is a frequent speaker at industry and academic conferences. Kimmo holds a Doctor of Science in Operations Research and a Master of Science in Finance.