9th Risk Summit (2018)

Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 for services to financial journalism. He was a member of the UK government’s Independent Commission on Banking between June 2010 and September 2011. Mr Wolf was made a Doctor of Science (Econ), honoris causa, by the London School of Economics in 2006 and a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, by Warwick University, in 2009. He is an honorary fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University and of King’s College, London.

Mr Wolf won the Ludwig Erhard Prize for economic commentary for 2009. He won “Commentariat of the Year 2009” at the Comment Awards, sponsored by Editorial Intelligence. He was placed 15th in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in December 2009 and 37th in the same list for 2010. He was joint winner of the 2009 award for columns in “giant newspapers” at the 15th annual Best in Business Journalism competition of The Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He won the 33rd Ischia International Journalism Prize in 2012. He won the Overseas Press Club of America’s prize for “best commentary on international news in any medium” for 2013.

His most recent publications are Why Globalization Works (Yale University Press, 2004), Fixing Global Finance (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Yale University Press, 2008 and 2010) and The Shifts and The Shocks: What we’ve learned – and have still to learn – from the financial crisis (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2014).

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.

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Hauke is a junior partner at McKinsey & Company, where he works with companies in the mobility and energy space on sustainability and strategy topics. He is a member of tt30, the young think tank of the Club of Rome, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has a background in astrophysics and is an avid mountaineer. 

In 2018 Daniel Franklin was appointed to Executive and Diplomatic Editor. Daniel initially held the role of Executive Editor of The Economist from 2006 and Editor since 2003 of The Economist‘s annual publication, The World in…; which focuses on the year ahead. Daniel published Megatech: Technology in 2050 in 2017 and his book on long-term trends, Megachange: The World in 2050, was published in 2012. Mr Franklin joined The Economist in 1983 to write about Soviet and East European affairs. As the newspaper’s Europe Editor from 1986 to 1992 he covered the great European upheavals, from the collapse of communism to the signing of the Maastricht treaty. After a stint as Britain Editor he moved to the United States as Washington Bureau Chief, covering the first Clinton term. In 1997 he moved back to London as Editorial Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit. From 2006 to 2010 he was Editor-in-Chief of Economist.com. For the following four years he was Business Affairs Editor, running the paper’s coverage of business, finance, science and technology. He also helps with new initiatives undertaken by The Economist Group. His special report on corporate social responsibility, Just good business, was published in 2008.

Zoë Knight is a Managing Director and Group Head of the HSBC Centre of Sustainable Finance. She joined HSBC in 2010 and most recently led the Climate Change Centre of Excellence within Global Research, having been an investment analyst at global financial institutions since 1997.

For ten years she focused on equity strategy, before focusing on socially responsible investing. Since joining HSBC Zoë has co-authored reports on low-carbon opportunities in bond and equity markets, as well as long-term carbon and water risks. Previously, she contributed a chapter to Investment Opportunities for a Low-Carbon World (2009). Throughout her career she has been ranked in Extel and Institutional Investor.

She also sits on the Board of the World Energy Council UK and holds a BSc (Hons) in Economics from the University of Bath.

Duncan Needham is Director of the Centre of Financial History at Newnham College, Director of the MPhil programme in Economic and Social History at the University of Cambridge, Associate Lecturer at the Faculty of History, and a Senior Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies.

After completing his first degree at the London School of Economics, and a Masters at Cass Business in Shipping, Trade and Finance, Duncan worked at Credit Suisse Financial Products and JP Morgan, where he ran the banks and financial 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 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014 as UK Monetary Policy from Devaluation to Thatcher, 1967-82.

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Aleksander Petrov is a Partner at McKinsey and Leader of the UK Risk Practice. He has broad experience in capital markets, derivatives pricing and portfolio management, supporting clients on a variety of risk topics focused on asset analysis, stress testing and recovery planning. Prior to joining McKinsey & Co in 2009 Aleksander Petrov spent approximately 10 years in various quant and trading role within the European fixed income. 

Simon Ruffle is a member of the Executive Team and is responsible for the overall research framework of the Centre. He is researching into innovative sourcing of business economic data and is leading the cyber threat research track. He has a background in natural hazards and the insurance industry.

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Robert is a sociologist in the Finance subject group at Cambridge Judge Business School. He has a successful track record of investing in and advising small and mid-sized firms in North America, Europe and Asia spanning over 30 years, and this experience led to his interest in understanding how and why alternative channels of finance emerge outside the traditional banking and capital markets system. His current research focuses on small and mid-sized firms that issue bonds as an alternative to bank financing, with the aim of better understanding the decision-making behaviour of firm owners and classes of investors across different economies. In addition to his academic role at the University of Cambridge, Robert currently serves on the Global Advisory Boards of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

Professor Elroy Dimson chairs the Newton Centre for Endowment Asset Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, and is Emeritus Professor of Finance at London Business School. He is a Non-Executive Director of FTSE International, is on the Steering Committee of the Financial Economists’ Roundtable, and is an Advisory Council member for Financial Analysts Journal. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Honorary Fellow of CFA UK and of the Institute of Actuaries. His PhD is from London Business School.

Professor Dimson’s books include Triumph of the Optimists, the Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2016, the Global Investment Returns Sourcebook 2016 (all with Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton), Endowment Asset Management (with Shanta Acharya), and Financial Market History (with David Chambers, forthcoming). Publications since 2015 have been on subjects such as active ownership (Review of Financial Studies), real assets (Journal of Financial Economics), financial history (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis), endowment strategy (Financial Analysts Journal), long-horizon investing (five book chapters), as well as case studies on manager selection and on stocks for the long run (both Harvard Business School).

Elroy Dimson has been an Emeritus Professor at London Business School since 2009. Prior to 2009, he served London Business School as Professor of Finance, Faculty Governor, Chair of the Finance Area, Chair of the Accounting Area, Dean of MBA Programmes, and Director of the Initiative on Foundation and Endowment Asset Management. He has held visiting positions at Chicago, Berkeley, the Bank of England, and other institutions, as well as a variety of board positions.

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Tina Fordham is Managing Director and Chief Global Political Analyst at Citi, the first to hold this position. Fordham joined Citi in 2003, where she advises institutional investors and corporate boards on the implications of macro political, security and socio-economic factors.

Fordham also spearheads Citi’s research on gender economics, and in 2016 was appointed to the United Nation’s first High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, which also include IMF President Christine Lagarde.

She has been named four times in the FN’s “Top 100 Most Influential Women in European Finance”, Harper’s Bazaar 150 Visionary Women in Britain and in 2017 was distinguished as being in the Top 100 Most Influential Geopolitics Experts worldwide, alongside Condoleezza Rice.

Fordham serves on the International Advisory Boards of the think tank Carnegie Europe and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where she earned her Master’s degree in International Affairs. She is also a member of the Citi Veterans Network.

Previously, she served as senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and head of global political risk at Eurasia Group, where she started the firm’s financial markets research business in 1999. She is a frequent commentator in the international press.

Dr Hugh Hunt is a Reader in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration at Cambridge University. His research centres on the control of noise and vibration from underground railways, but he got caught up in geoengineering as Co-Investigator on the SPICE project, 2010-15, which looked at various aspects of SRM. He was responsible for an outdoor experiment, the 1km test-bed, which was intended to evaluate the influence of win on the motion of a tethered balloon, but controversy over geoengineering experiments led to the test-bed being cancelled. He is now promoting other technologies for the removal of non-CO2 greenhouse gases, in particular methane and N20. He also runs the Cambridge Climate Lecture Series which aims to raise awareness of the urgency around climate change.

Hugh is a regular presenter on television documentaries on Channel 4, PBS Nova and SBS, including “Dambusters: Building the Bouncing Bomb”, “Attack of the Zeppelins”, “Escape from Colditz” and “Guy Martin Wall of Death”. He is Keeper of the Clock at Trinity College, a clock which is demonstrably the most accurate tower clock in the world. He has an impressive collection of boomerangs which he uses to inspire students in the study of dynamics and mechanics.

Eireann is a Risk Researcher at the Centre for Risk Studies, where his research focuses upon technological disasters and the economic impacts of computer security failures or accidents.

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William J Nuttall is Professor of Energy at the Open University, based in Milton Keynes, UK. He joined the Open University in October 2012 from the University of Cambridge where he had taught Technology Policy for ten years.

Professor Nuttall’s career has taken him from experimental physics (completing a PhD at MIT, USA in 1993) to technology policy with an emphasis on nuclear energy policy.

He is Open University lead for the EPSRC Imperial, Cambridge, Open Centre for Doctoral Training in Nuclear Energy; he is Honorary Editor and Chair of the Editorial Panel for the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Energy; and he is a Fellow of Hughes Hall Cambridge. He has extensive policy advice experience for the UK Government and the institutions of the European Union.

He was recently involved in a major EPSRC funded collaboration concerning policy for severe nuclear accident response. That multifaceted study concluded that a policy of large-scale population relocation following a severe nuclear accident will rarely be of significant benefit and it can come at great cost in financial and other terms.

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 Cambridge 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.

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.