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Society For Risk Analysis Annual Meeting 2007

Risk 007: Agents of Analysis

Plenary Sessions

Joseph LeDoux, Center for Neural Science, New York University:

"Fearful Brains in an Anxious World"

Joseph LeDoux is a University Professor and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, and a member of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at NYU. His 1977 PhD is in Psychology from the State University of Stony Brook. He was a postdoctoral fellow and then an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Cornell University Medical College. In 1989 he joined New York University. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he is author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the New York Academy of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the recipient of the 2005 Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science.

Website: http://www.cns.nyu.edu/ledoux/

Elke U. Weber, Center for Decision Sciences, Columbia University:

"The Risk we Perceive and the Risk we Take"

Elke U. Weber is the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. Previously she has held academic positions in both the United States and Europe. She spent a year at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, half a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and is currently a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. As an expert on behavioral models of decision making under risk and uncertainty, she has been investigating psychologically appropriate ways to measure individual and cultural differences in risk taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental decisions. Weber is past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and has served on three advisory committees of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, on human dimensions in global change. At Columbia, she founded and co-directs the Center for the Decision Sciences (CDS), which fosters and facilitates cross-disciplinary research and graduate training in the basic and applied decision sciences, and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which investigates ways of facilitating human adaptation to climate change and climate variability.

Website: http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/whoswho/full.cfm?id=55663

Esperanza Lopez Vazquez, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico

"Risk Analysis in Latin America: Challenges and Prospects"

Esperanza LOPEZ VAZQUEZ is a research professor at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Mexico, which she joined in September 2006, after spending 7 years at the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Université de Toulouse Le-Mirail in Toulouse, France, in 1999. Dr. Lopez Vazquez also has held an appointment as National Researcher, Level I, in the Sistema Nacional de Investogadores of Mexico, since 2001.

Her research examines the risk perceptions of people exposed to natural, environmental and technologic hazards. She has focused on the risk perceptions, stress, and coping strategies of people who have lived through a disaster, such as the 2001 eruption of Popocatépetl volcano in central Mexico, and she is currently developing studies on risk perception of environmental and technological hazards in developing countries. She is the author of articles concerning these topics. She has been a peer reviewer of manuscripts in international journals of psychology, risk analysis, and volcanic risk perception, and a guest editor for the special issue on "Risk Perception and Social Trust" of the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues.

Dr Lopez Vazquez has been active in the Society of Risk Analysis. SRA-Europe gave her the Best Young Scientist Paper Award in 1999 at the European meeting in Rotterdam. She is currently one of the principal organizers of the new SRA-Latin America regional group. She helped organize the first meeting of risk analysts in Mexico, in October 2006, and is now working to organize the second such meeting to be held in February 2008.

Jinren NI, College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University

Jinren NI has been a full professor at the Peking University, China since 1992. He founded and has been the director of the Institute of Environmental Engineering since its establishment in 1994. He has overall more than 16 years teaching, research and consulting experiences in Hydraulic Engineering, Environmental Sciences and Engineering. He has published four books and more than 200 refereed journal papers, has been awarded over 20 research grants including the Special Fund for Distinguished Scholars from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and has supervised to completion over 60 (and has under supervision another 40) postgraduate students. He is the editorial board director of the Journal of Basic Science and Engineering. His other duties include editorial board member of Chinese Science Bulletin, Advances in Water Sciences, Resources Science, Journal of Peking University and Journal of Natural Disasters, Member of the Chinese People's Political Consulting Conference and the Special Committee for Population, Resources and Environment, and invited state supervisor in the Ministry of Land Resources.

Chongfu Huang, Beijing Normal University

Chongfu Huang is a full professor of Beijing Normal University. He received his B.A.Sc. in Mathematics from Yunnan University, Kunming, China; M.A.Sc. in Earthquake Engineering from Institute of Engineering Mechanics, Harbin, China; Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Beijing Normal University. From 1993 to 1995 he worked in Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics as a postdoctoral research fellow. He is the president of Risk Analysis Council of China Association for Disaster Prevention, and the director of Research Center for System Simulation and Disaster Modeling, Academy of Disaster Reduction and Emergency Management Ministry of Civil Affairs & Ministry of Education. As an advisor, he serves for Beijing Muncipal Emergency Management Office to assess risk.

He worked in the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a research associate, in Tokyo University of Science as an associate professor in 1996. As a visiting professor, he worked in University of Ghent, Belgium, in 1997 and in University Nebraska at Omaha, USA, in 2000. From 2000 to 2001, he was a Mercator professor and worked in University of Dortmund, Germany. As a visiting professor, he worked again in Tokyo University of Science and University of Ghent in 2004 and 2006, respectively.

His significant contributions to science would involve the discovery of the principle of information diffusion which asserts that, there must be diffusion functions to change crisp data into fuzzy sets for partly filling the gap among the data as incomplete information, so that the recognition will be improved. He found that, the kernel functions serving for the nonparametric estimation play the role of diffusion functions. There are so many researchers who employ the methods based on the principle to deal with small samples.

From 1994, he devoted to study disaster risk issues and to develop the risk discipline in China. In 1996 when he visited Japan, he promoted to organize the First China-Japan Conference on Risk Assessment and Management, which was held in Beijing in 1998 and led up to forming of a risk community in China. His significant contributions to society would be that he established Risk Analysis Council of China Association for Disaster Prevention in 2004, which is the unique academic organization authorized by the Chinese government for studying all risk issues.

Javier Urbina-Soria, National University of Mexico, and Co-Chair, Second World Congress on Risk

Javier Urbina-Soria has been full time Professor at the School of Psychology, National University of Mexico, for more than 30 years. From 1989 to 1993, he was Dean of the School of Psychology. His research themes have been the teaching of psychology, health promotion, and mainly environmental psychology, the field in which he is coordinating the Master?s Degree Course. Specific topics he has studied during recent years include environmental risk perception and environmental risk communication. He has presented more than 220 papers and published about 50 articles and chapters. Recently he edited the book Beyond Climate Change: The Psycho-Social Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (in Spanish). He was Director General for the National Population Registry, Director General for Religious Affairs, and Director General for Health Promotion (from 1995 to 2000) in the Mexican Federal Government. Professor Urbina-Soria is a member of the Editorial Board and was member of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). Among other meetings, he was in charge of the general organization of the 22nd Annual Conference on Environmental Design Research (Oaxtepec, Mexico) and the 5th World Conference on Health Promotion (Mexico City).

Robin Cantor, Navigant Consulting, Inc., and Co-Chair, Second World Congress on Risk

Dr. Robin Cantor is a Managing Director at Navigant Consulting, Inc. She has more than 20 years of consulting and research experience and specializes in environmental and energy economics, statistics, risk management, and insurance claims analysis. In addition, she leads the Liability Estimation and Insurance Claims Analysis practice at Navigant Consulting, which helps companies and financial institutions better understand asbestos and other product liability exposures. Her experience includes product liability estimation in bankruptcy matters, product liability analysis for insurance disputes, statistical analysis of asbestos settlements, analysis of premises and product claims, cost contribution allocation in Superfund disputes, reliability of statistical models and estimation methods, and economic analysis of market and product activities. Dr. Cantor has authored journal articles, books, and expert reports and has submitted analysis, testimony and affidavits in federal arbitration, regulatory and Congressional proceedings, and federal and state court. Dr. Cantor received her Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University and her B.S. in Mathematics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Cass R. Sunstein, University of Chicago

"Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron"

Cass R. Sunstein graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. After graduation, he clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney-advisor in the Office of the Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, including Ukraine, Poland, China, South Africa, and Russia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Mr. Sunstein has been Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia, visiting professor of law at Harvard, vice-chair of the ABA Committee on Separation of Powers and Governmental Organizations, chair of the Administrative Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the ABA Committee on the future of the FTC, and a member of the President's Advisory Committee on the Public Service Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters.

Mr. Sunstein is a member of the Department of Political Science as well as the Law School. He is author of many articles and a number of books, including After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (1990), Constitutional Law (co-authored with Geoffrey Stone, Louis M. Seidman, and Mark Tushnet) (1995), The Partial Constitution (1993), Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1993), Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (1996), Free Markets and Social Justice (1997), Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy (1998) (with Justice Stephen Breyer and Professor Richard Stewart and Matthew Spitzer), One Case At A Time (1999), Behavioral Law and Economics (editor, 2000), Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (2001), Republic.com (2001), Risk and Reason (2002), The Cost-Benefit State (2002), Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), The Second Bill of Rights (2004), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), and Worst-Case Scenarios (forthcoming 2007), and Nudge: The Gentle Power of Libertarian Paternalism (with Richard Thaler, forthcoming 2008). He is now working on various projects involving the relationship between law and human behavior.

Website: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/sunstein

Discussant: John D. Graham, Rand Corp.

John D. Graham is the Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the educational arm of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Prior to joining RAND, he served in the George W. Bush Administration as Administrator of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (2001-2006). From 1985 to 2000 he was Professor of Policy and Decision Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. He earned his B.A. (economics and politics) from Wake Forest University (1978), his M.A. (public policy) from Duke University (1980) his Ph.D. (public policy) from Carnegie-Mellon University (1983) and his post-doctoral fellowship (environmental science and public policy) from the Harvard School of Public Health. He served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) in 1995-96.

Discussant: Alison C. Cullen, University of Washington & ETH Zurich

Alison C. Cullen is Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where she has taught since 1995. In 2007-08 she is also a visiting professor at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and the incoming President-Elect of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). Previously, she held positions in the Water Quality Branch of the US EPA and on the faculty of the Harvard University School of Public Health. Her research involves the analysis of environmental risks, decision making in the face of risks which are uncertain or vary across populations, and the application of value of information and distributional techniques. She is active in environmental exposure assessment projects in the US and internationally. At University of Washington, Professor Cullen serves on the Board of the Environmental Management program, the Steering Committee of the Earth Initiative, and the Center for the Study and Improvement of Regulation (in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon).

Professor Cullen has served as a technical consultant to many groups including the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the State of Washington's Department of Ecology, the City of Seattle's Office of Sustainability and the Ministry of Public Health in the Slovak Republic. She also served on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Coeur d'Alene Superfund site (2003-2005) and as an affiliate scientist on the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Uncertainty Initiative (2000-2004 ). In 2003 Dr. Cullen was honored with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Special Recognition in the Field of Air Toxics. Dr. Cullen's research also has been recognized with the Chauncey Starr Award from the Society for Risk Analysis in 2002 and the Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the International Society of Exposure Assessment in 1998. Professor Cullen holds a Sc.D. in Environmental Health Management (1992) and a M.S. in Environmental Health Science, Exposure Assessment and Engineering (1989) both from Harvard University School of Public Health, and a B.S. in Civil/Environmental Engineering (1984) from MIT.