The Centre for Risk Studies team

Professor Daniel Ralph is a Founder and Academic Director of the Centre for Risk Studies, Professor of Operations Research at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Fellow of Churchill College. Daniel’s research interests include identification and management of systemic risk, risk aversion in investment, economic equilibria models and optimisation methods. Management stress test, via selection and construction of catastrophe scenarios, is one focus of his work in the Centre for Risk Studies. Another is the role and expression of risk management within organisations. Daniel engages across scientific and social science academia, a variety of commercial and industrial sectors, and government policy making. He was Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Programming (Series B) from 2007-2013.

Andrew is a Founder and Director of the Centre for Risk Studies’ External Advisory Board, and Senior Vice President at Risk Management Solutions, the leading provider of catastrophe risk models to the insurance industry. He is also a Fellow of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Michelle Tuveson is a Founder and Executive Director at the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies hosted at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. Her responsibilities include the overall executive leadership at the Centre. This includes developing partnership relationships with corporations, governments, and other academic centres.

Jayne is the Administrator at the Centre for Risk Studies and also responsible for assisting in planning, coordinating and support of all Centre events.

Oliver is a Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies, where his primary focus is on Project Pandora, which aims to develop a risk analysis framework to understand and model impacts from various natural and man-made global catastrophes.

Jennifer Copic is a Senior Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies. Her research covers scenario stress test development, regulatory risk and reporting, cyber security loss estimations, emerging risks, and insurance loss estimation, with a focus on litigation and liability scenarios. Jennifer previously led the application framework specification activities for risk dashboards and other visualisation projects for complex data sets to enable organisations to make data driven decisions. She holds a bachelors in chemical engineering from the University of Louisville and a masters in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan.

Prior to joining the Centre for Risk Studies, Jennifer worked as a systems engineer for General Mills at a manufacturing plant. She really enjoys modelling and visualising data in order to help others make more informed decisions.

Tamara Evan is the Editorial Associate for the Centre for Risk Studies and oversees the completion, production and final delivery of the Centre’s research publications and risk scenario reports.

Taryn is a risk researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies and works on disseminating our taxonomy of business risks.

Taryn’s background is in the third sector, having worked in a communications role at a rare disease charity and as director of operations at a humanitarian NGO. She has also been a freelance policy researcher, producing reports on UK fire safety regulations for high rise buildings. Taryn has a first-class honours degree in English from Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.

Jay is a Senior Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies, and is interested in examining various aspects of risk elements in the network of financial services institutions and developing tools that can monitor and analyse behaviour of financial networks.

Dr Scott Kelly is a Research Principal at the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). His research interests include sustainability economics, risk analysis and the economics of climate change. He is a research affiliate at the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and an associate of the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research. Prior to his role at ISF he was Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow of Darwin College.

Eireann is a founder and director of Concinnity Risks, and has published a variety of cyber security and academic cyber risk papers. He collaborates with the Centre for Risk Studies regularly as a Senior Risk Researcher, and is a co-author with Andrew Coburn and Gordon Woo on their 2017 book Solving Cyber Risk.

He holds his BEng in AI and Software Engineering from the University of Edinburgh and his MPhil in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. He continued his education as an Ethical Hacker focused on critical national infrastructure and industrial systems around the world for three years, before returning to cyber risk entrepreneurship and academic research in equal measure.

Farnaz is working with the Centre for Risk Studies to analyse resilience and recovery and role of insurance after earthquakes, tsunami, storms and floods.

Duncan is a Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies, Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge.

Oliver Pearson is a Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies. Oliver’s background is in mixed media and communications. Oliver has a first-class honours degree in American and English literature as well as a masters degree in American literature.

Steve Platt is a Director of Cambridge Architectural Research and his research focuses on disaster resilience and recovery.

Andrew’s research interests include risk modelling (particularly combining data science with expert knowledge), the economics of catastrophe, Bayesian statistics, and future risks from climate change and biodiversity loss. He is currently developing multi-threat risk analysis tools for insurers and corporates.

Andrew has previously held academic research posts in the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, where he also completed his PhD research on how companies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their global supply chains. Andrew has an earlier background in design and holds an MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development from the University of Cambridge and a MEng from the University of Durham.

Since obtaining his PhD at Cambridge University in Engineering, Tim has worked in many industries including manufacturing, finance, mineral resources and AI. His current main interests are in data mining and machine learning, applied to strategic business and security issues. He is supporting the Centre’s research into horizon scanning and developing algorithms for real time business intelligence. Tim originates from London and has spent much of his career in Asia.

Taha Tariq is the Geopolitical Research Lead for the Centre for Risk Studies. He received his MSc in International Relations with a Distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He has had prior experience in using open-source intelligence analysis to provide political risk advisory services.

Taha’s research spans contemporary issues concerning geopolitics, defence, and security. Within this cluster, Taha has further researched on international strategic conflict, military modernisation programs, public-private armament partnerships, weapons of mass destruction, ideological terrorism, domestic political polarisation, comparative national institution-building, state failure, geoeconomics, and outer space politics.

William has a Masters in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Nottingham. His interests include building algorithms to manage and interrogate data and using machine learning tools to develop solutions to problems.

With a background spanning climate, environmental and flood risk modelling, Paul has spent 20 years helping companies understand and interpret the outputs of scientific-, engineering- and (loss) experience-based risk metrics related to natural catastrophe risk, terrorism, cyber, longevity and pandemic risk, ensuring that the people, processes and technologies are in place to apply these risk insights to product pricing, risk management and portfolio management.

Winston Krone is the Global Managing Director of Kivu Consulting, an international technology firm specializing in the forensic response to cyber-attacks and proactive risk reduction. Winston has supervised hundreds of incidents globally in a 20-year career and has a particular expertise on responding to cyber extortion events. He has advised corporate boards and crisis committees during attacks, working with law enforcement, and providing findings to regulators in both the US and UK. Winston has been retained as a testifying cyber expert in both the US and UK in hacking cases and post-breach class-action litigation.
Winston has over 10 years’ experience working with cyber insurance carriers in North America and Europe on assessing the risk of attacks and developing models for effective technical response. He has extensively presented and published on these subjects, including presenting on cyber extortion negotiations for the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies’ Future of Cyber Risk 2019 event.
Prior to joining Kivu, Winston worked as an attorney both in private practice and for the United Nations in Africa and the Former Yugoslavia. He is both an English solicitor and California attorney, and received his law degree from Oxford University, UK. He was appointed a US Federal Master to advise on the secure usage of digital data in a case involving millions of California students. Winston holds patents for a remote analysis and collection tool that has been used in data breaches around the world.

Dr Rainer Sachs is a senior risk researcher and risk management expert.

He is the founder and owner of the Sachs-Institute, a transdisciplinary think tank for better coping with risk and uncertainty. Rainer Sachs’ current research interests focus on modelling complex risks in insurance and human behaviour in decisions under uncertainty. A main objective of his work is the transfer of research results into risk management practices.

Previously he was the head of the Emerging Risks team of Munich Re, developing risk identification and assessment tools for emerging risks, accumulation scenarios and systemic risks.

During his almost 20-year career in the financial industry, he has held various positions in financial and insurance risk management, both in Germany and Australia.

Rainer Sachs holds a PhD in complex systems theory from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich/Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial Physics and a Master in cosmology from the Technical University of Munich/University of Pune (India).

Andrew Freeman is a risk advisor, NED, investor, author and pensions expert who has been a Fellow of the Centre since 2012. Over a 35-year career he has been a writer and commentator on risk and finance, and has recently enjoyed seven years as a risk manager in the investment industry, notably as Chief Risk Officer of Ardian, one of Europe’s most successful private equity firms.

Tom Harvey brings many years of experience of working with risk decision makers in large financial services companies to the Centre’s applications of management science. Tom has specialised in decision support for cyber risk as well as predictive analytics, particularly in insurance underwriting, portfolio optimisation, and claims management.

At the Centre, Tom is focusing on the application of analytics in risk management for large corporations, particularly for climate change and emerging risks.

Tom is currently the lead of the European Predictive Analytics and Risk Solution Consulting team at Guidewire, and previously worked at Risk Management Solutions (RMS), where he led product management for RMS’ cyber model and software application. As part of the original cyber team at RMS, Tom worked alongside the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies and a team of industry partners to define and release the industry’s first cyber exposure data standard. He has since partnered with many of the leading cyber insurers to improve their quantification of cyber risk and managed the development of the industry’s first probabilistic cyber catastrophe model.

Prior to joining RMS, Tom was at Hewlett Packard Software (HPS) in the European consulting team, working closely with several FTSE 100 companies within the energy and finance sectors to support the adoption of HP’s IT management and security products. Tom holds a BSc (Hons) from the University of Leeds in biochemistry and bioinformatics.

Nick is a qualified accountant and supply chain professional and has held a variety of global financial, procurement and commercial positions in several industry sectors, working for companies such as PWC, BOC Group, The Virgin Group, and Zurich Insurance Group.

He has spoken and written on several topics related to business intelligence and supply chain management. He served on the Board of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply which is the biggest procurement professional body in the world with over 100,000 members. He also served as a specialist advisor to the World Economic Forum on the topic of systemic supply chain risk and was Chairman of the Supply Chain Risk Leadership Council and still serves on their Board.

From 2008 he led the development and rollout of innovative and multi award winning supply chain risk products for Zurich Insurance Group, which gave him the opportunity to interact with many global companies and understand how they are addressing the real risk issues they are facing in terms of their supply chains and driving business performance.

He set up his own consultancy in 2018, advising in all areas related to procurement and supply chain performance with a focus on supply chain.