Centre alumni

Fabio Caccioli was a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Risk Studies. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe, US), and he holds a PhD in Statistical Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies (Trieste, Italy). His research mainly focused on systemic risk and financial stability, as well as complex networks and statistical mechanics.

Roxane Foulser-Piggott was 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 research interests lay in GIS, spatial statistics, structural vulnerability and ground motion modelling.

Dr Malik worked as a research associate in the cyber research track at the Centre for Risk Studies. Dr Malik holds a PhD in Information Systems from Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, and his research project was mainly based on identifying the technical and social issues with the use of customer relationship management (CRM) in the banking industry.

Dr Edward J Oughton led the digital communications modelling work on the EPSRC-funded project entitled Multi-scale InfraSTRucture systems AnaLytics (Mistral) alongside Dr David Cleevely CBE. As Research Associate in the Centre for Risk Studies he led the Centre’s work on the management of critical infrastructure failure. His work has been used for the National Infrastructure Commission’s 5G strategy and the ICE’s National Needs Assessment.

Gary Bowman was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Risk Studies. His research spanned the risk and strategy domains, focusing particularly on scenario planning, systemic risk, networks, corporate governance, and the interplay between strategic decision-making and risk attitudes.

Gary worked on developing the Cambridge Risk Framework as part of the ‘System Shock’ project, a multi-disciplinary research programme to study the impact of macro-catastrophes on the global networks and systems that underpin modern society. The Framework combined a comprehensive threat taxonomy, network and systems research, and scenario-based stress tests to help analyse and assess global vulnerabilities.

Within the Centre for Risk Studies, Gary also pursued research on a diverse range of topics using different theoretical approaches. He was involved with studies on supply chain disruptions, institutional trust and financial regulations, corporate governance and the role and emergence of chief risk officers, and the conceptual duality of risk and strategy.

Gary’s previous research focused on the process and practices of corporate strategy. His PhD, from the University of St Andrews, offers an empirical and longitudinal analysis of multiple scenario-based interventions in corporate-level strategic planning. Bridging the gaps between theory, method and practice, the thesis locates scenario planning within a broader strategic framework, as a situated activity, tied inextricably to the world around it. Gary continues to work and publish in this area, focusing most recently on exploring the application of scenario planning techniques in the public sector and their role as organisational sensemaking devices.

Prior to joining Cambridge, Gary held academic positions at the Universities of St Andrews and Strathclyde Business School, and has consulted for numerous private and public sector organisations on scenario-informed strategic planning.

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.

Jay Jung is an associate of the Centre for Risk Studies. Jay has expertise in performing business analytics and measuring the performance of global financial services institutions operating in emerging economies.

Jay 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.

Jay holds a PhD degree in History from the University of Cambridge and has worked with and advised executives at numerous financial institutions and multinational corporations.

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.

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.

Gabriele was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. His occupations concerned risk models in terms of both qualitative and quantitative analysis and implementation.

Gabriele achieved a masters degree in quantitative finance in Paris and previously a masters degree in accounting and business in Italy. He gained experience in operational and financial risk management in Germany and Luxembourg.

Matteo was a Geopolitical Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies, specialising in the analysis of geopolitical events to identify the strategic implications for business.

Prior to joining the Centre for Risk Studies, he worked as energy analyst at IHS Markit and as political risk analyst at Oxford Analytica.

Matteo holds an MA in international relations from Central European University where he specialised in conflict and country risk analysis.

Eugene Neduv was an expert in quantitative methods in finance and a risk management professional at Cambridge Judge. His interests included network analytics, volatility trading and portfolio optimisation.

Eugene graduated from Columbia University in 2002 with a PhD degree in Mathematics and continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the Brazil Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and Humboldt University in Germany.

Eugene has 10 years’ work experience in financial analytics and risk management software and as an independent consultant for several hedge funds in New York and Sao Paulo.

Louise Pryor’s career has covered software, financial modelling, academia and financial regulation in a variety of roles. She has worked in the insurance industry as an actuary and software risk consultant, specialising in risk management, modelling and systems and controls. More recently she was Director, Actuarial Standards at the Financial Reporting Council, where she led the development of technical Actuarial Standards and was a member of the Board for Actuarial Standards. She is also an experienced software developer and development manager, and has a PhD in Computer Science.

The common theme throughout her work at Cambridge Judge was risk and uncertainty. She was involved in the management of risk at all levels: operationally, in project management; conceptually, reasoning about and modelling risks in workflow management and financial services; and strategically, considering the pros and cons of policy initiatives.

Ganchi is currently Associate in Market Risk Capital Analysis at Goldman Sachs. Ganchi completed a PhD in Machine Learning and Statistical Modelling, as well as completing a project for the Centre for Risk Studies on agent-based network modelling.

Dr Andrew Chaplin was a Non-Resident Senior Member of King’s College, Cambridge. He has Eurozone central government and central bank economic, fiscal and monetary policy formation advisory experience under financial crisis conditions and is member of a private international government advisory expert network. He has advised a pre-EU accession candidate sovereign on economic reform policy. His doctorate is in econometric modelling from the University of Cambridge, where he was member of the Cambridge Growth Project. He holds a masters degree in economics from Oxford University, where he was member of the Governing Body and Investment Committee of Wolfson College, and he has early career private banking and non- executive board director experience. During the Thatcher Administration he was Economic Adviser to the Cabinet Office Policy Unit for regulatory reform and deregulation policy. He has held a Mediterranean university econometrics lectureship and supervised for the University of Cambridge’s Economics Tripos. He worked with the Policy Fellows Programme at the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge Judge Business School, and research interests included central bank response to international crises.

Ben was a Risk Researcher in the Centre for Risk Studies. His background is as a mathematician, having worked on projects with the civil service and the defence sector. He holds a first class degree from the University of Edinburgh.

Ben’s work at the Centre was focused on the open source Cambridge Risk Framework project. In order to better understand consequences for the world macroeconomy, research at the Centre rephrased supply chains in terms of enterprise links, moving away from focus on a particular product or service. Ben worked on developing a custom supply chain model to enable computer simulations of this new point of view. Ben was also involved in the construction of a model for calculating the impact of cyber catastrophe on the world’s largest enterprises, trying to capture how interdependencies in the economy lead to amplifications in catastrophe impact.

Ben’s other research interests included data science, particularly making use of the increasing resources available under Open Data initiatives.

Kristen’s work with the Centre for Risk Studies as a Risk Researcher focused on examining how cities recover from disaster.

James was a PhD student at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. He was researching interactions between coastal erosion and flooding risk, focussing on the role of extreme storm surge events. He has further interest in satellite-based applications to coastal problems and approaches to communicating complex environmental risks.

James Bourdeau was a research assistant for cyber terrorism for the Centre of Risk Studies. He has a background in political science and international relations. Prior to joining the Risk Centre, he completed his undergraduate degree in Political Science at Sacred Heart University and received an MA in Intelligence and International Security from the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He has also interned at the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations.

Tim Douglas was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies where he worked on the risk modelling of multiple cyber threats to insurance. He has a multidisciplinary background having completed a first degree in Criminology followed by a MA in Economics and Politics at the University of York.

Arjun Mahalingam was a Research Assistant working on data research at the Centre for Risk Studies. His main focus was on Project Pandora; a project that aims to model all-ills under a unified framework.

Kelly supported research in multi-line insurance exposure, cyber risk, and Project Pandora, which models the risks of multiple threats to global and city-level economies. Her primary interests are in data management, catastrophic planning, and the risk management of natural hazards.

Andrew Smith was a Research Assistant working on multi-line insurance exposure and cyber risk.

Jessica Tsang was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies where she worked on the risk modelling of multiple threat types to the global and city-level economy.

Ken Deng was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies and has a background in corporate finance, asset pricing and economics in general.

Viktorija completed an MSc in Economics from the University of Nottingham, which was fully funded by the European Union. Prior to joining the Centre for Risk Studies, she worked as a language interpreter for several years; her most recent employment was with the University of Nottingham.

Olivia Majumdar was the Editorial Assistant for the Centre for Risk Studies and helped to oversee the editing and production of the Centre’s publications.

Ali Rais Shaghaghi was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies, University of Cambridge, and researched a model of contagion effects in the international banking network. He was previously a KTP Associate and a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Essex. Ali holds a PhD in Computational Finance from the Centre for Computational Finance and Economics Agents at the University of Essex. His research mainly focused on analysing systemic risk and contagion in financial systems using computational network models.

Kayla Strong was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies, University of Cambridge, and supported research in multi-line insurance exposure and cyber risk. She holds a BES in Geography and Environmental Management from the University of Waterloo, and a MA in Risk from Durham University.

Prior to joining the Centre for Risk Studies, Kayla was involved in cyber risk research for Liberty Specialty Markets, working in tandem with the Catastrophe Modelling team. Kayla’s personal research relates to technological disasters, catastrophic planning, and community resilience.

Jaclyn was a Research Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies, and graduated with an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Engineering for Sustainable Development. At the Centre for Risk Studies, Jaclyn supported the research on macroeconomic modelling, the main tool used for describing risk scenarios developed as part of the Cambridge Risk Framework. Jaclyn’s specific research areas included the analysis of climate change and port disruptions, regional trade and economy, and sector analysis.

Prior to joining the Centre for Risk Studies, Jaclyn worked in a specialist consultancy firm in Singapore as an environmental engineer and consultant, specialising in environmental monitoring, impact assessments and project management.

Shaheera Asante was the Editorial Assistant at the Centre for Risk Studies. Shaheera aided in the Centre’s internal editorial and publication processes and contributed to its external communications and expanding social media presence.

Sonia was the Coordinator at the Centre for Risk Studies. She supported the Centre’s range of activities such as event management, finance, human resources and recruitment, administration and other operational and project support. Additionally, Sonia provided administrative and personal assistant support to four Directors at the Centre, and was the first point of contact for the Centre.

Matthew was Senior Advisor of Insurance Markets at the Centre for Risk Studies. Matthew is the founder of Abernite, providing strategic planning, company assessment, sales support and partners to assist startups, early growth companies, investors and insurers in the rapidly growing insurance technology field. Prior to founding Abernite, Matthew spent 25 years driving the growth in the insurance market for catastrophe modelling across US, Europe and Asia.

Alan has spent 25 years in the insurance industry with international broking groups Sedgwick, Alexander & Alexander and Aon, in a variety of risk analysis, risk consultancy and risk financing roles. He was also CEO of Aon Capital Markets Limited, until his retirement from Aon in 2008.

Alan has written widely in the professional trade press and spoken at over a hundred international conferences on risk management and risk financing issues. He was awarded the inaugural Lumina Award for outstanding research in reinsurance in 2001, wrote the Institute of Financial Services textbook on Risk Financing and Management, and was co-author of the 2011 Airmic report Roads to Ruin: A Study of Major Risk Events, Their Origins, Impact and Implications, a detailed case study review of 18 corporate crises. In 2013 he completed a further case study-based report for Airmic entitled Supply Chain Failures.

His main activities recently included being a Visiting Professor at the Cass Business School, City University, where he lectured on the MSc in Insurance and Risk Management programme, and as an Associate of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies.

Alan holds a BTech degree in Mathematics, an MSc in Statistics, a PhD in Operations Research and an MBA in Finance (with distinction). He also obtained the Associate in Risk Management and Associate in Reinsurance qualifications from the Insurance Institute of America.

Dr Ruth Whaley was Director of Corporate Development for the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies. Ruth was based in New York and is Senior Consultant at the Regulatory Fundamentals Group (RFG), which provides advisory services on the impact and implementation of regulatory change for financial service companies. For the past 10 years she was the Chief Risk Officer of MBIA, member of the Executive Committee and managed credit, market and operational risk across the firm. Earlier positions included corporate banking at UBS and Citibank in leveraged finance and energy. Ruth is an alumnus of Cambridge and Harvard Universities, and a Barbara Bodichon Fellow at Girton College.

Diane Lanigan’s role at the Centre for Risk Studies (CRS) was to increase the community of social media followers and promote the thought leadership of CRS and adoption of its research outputs. Her previous experiences included working as a technical writer and in business development for a risk management company specialising in mortality risk. She also worked as a professional writer for the past 15 years. She holds a primary degree in biochemistry from University College of Dublin and a postgraduate degree in science journalism from New York University.

Siobhan is currently CEO and Founder of CLARA, an innovative legal technology platform focused on providing forward looking legal analytics. Siobhan was a Risk Fellow at the Centre for Risk Studies, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Prior to this, she worked as a solicitor at King & Wood Mallesons and as in-house legal counsel at a leading Australian and international steel producer.

Siobhan has published numerous articles in leading refereed Australian and international law journals. She won the Cambridge-McKinsey Risk Prize 2015 and has been featured in the Financial Times, Business Review Weekly, Reuters and many others. She co-founded the Cambridge Judge Business School Women’s Leadership Initiative.