Confronting radical uncertainty - POSTPONED

Gus O'Donnell is Chairman of Frontier Economics, Strategic Advisor to TD Bank, Executive Director and Strategic Advisor to Brookfield Asset Management, Chair of PwC’s Public Interest Body (PIB), President of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), Chair of the Board of Trustees for Pro Bono Economics, Visiting Professor at LSE and UCL, a member of the Economist Trust, and Chair of the Behavioural Insights Team Advisory Board at the Cabinet Office. Gus was Cabinet Secretary and Head of the British Civil Service from 2005–2011. In 2010, he oversaw the introduction of the first coalition government since the Second World War. Previously, he was Permanent Secretary of the Treasury from 2002–2005 and served on the IMF and World Bank Boards. Gus studied Economics at Warwick University and Nuffield College, Oxford, then lectured at Glasgow University. Knighted in 2005, Gus was appointed to the House of Lords in 2012, sitting as a crossbencher (ie not affiliated to any political party). Gus is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

John Kay is an economist whose career has spanned the academic world, business and finance, and public affairs. He has held chairs at the London Business School, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, where he began his academic career in 1970. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

John is a director of several public companies and a contributing editor of the Financial Times. He chaired the Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision-Making which reported to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in July 2012. He is the author of many books, including The Truth about Markets (2003), The Long and the Short of It (2009, new revised edition 2016) and Obliquity (2010). His latest book, Other People’s Money was published by Profile Books and (in North America) by PublicAffairs in September 2015, was a book of the year for Bloomberg, The Economist and the Financial Times, winner of the Saltire Literary Prize for non-fiction, and was short-listed for the Orwell Prize for political writing. His next book, Radical Uncertainty, jointly written with Mervyn King, will be published in March 2020.

Eliza Manningham-Buller has been Chair of Wellcome Trust since 2015, having served as a Governor since 2008. She leads a Board of Governors drawn from the worlds of science, business and public life.

In 2015, Eliza became the Co-President of Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. She served on the Council of Imperial College from 2009 and was Chair of Council from 2011-2015.

She was appointed an independent, crossbench peer in the House of Lords in 2008, and has been a member of the Privileges and Conduct Committee, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, and the Science and Technology Committee.

Previously, Eliza had a career with MI5 for more than 30 years. She served as Director General from 2002-2007 and before that was Deputy Director General.

Dr Trevor Maynard is Head of Innovation at Lloyd’s of London. He is responsible for Lloyd's Lab, the insurance innovation accelerator at the heart of the Lloyd’s market. He runs Lloyd’s thought leadership programme working with expert suppliers to produce outputs in recent months on the New Space economy, supply chain modelling, AI and Robotics and Cyber scenarios. Trevor is Chairman of Oasis, the open source Catastrophe Modelling platform on Github, is a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE, a member of the Insurtech board of the Fintech Delivery Panel and an observing Board member of LayR the digitial broker for SMEs. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and has a Master's Degree in Pure Maths from the University of Warwick and a PhD in Statistics from the LSE.

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He is former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Law at the University of Virginia. He is Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences and Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Basel and the Open University of the Netherlands, and is Batten Fellow at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia. Awards for his work include the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. The Swiss Duttweiler Institute has distinguished Gigerenzer as one of the top-100 Global Thought Leaders worldwide.

Professor Jürgen Jost is Director and permanent member of the Max Planck Institute for Mathemematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, and holds an honorary professorship at the University of Leipzig.

He has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award of the DFG and the Science Prize of the Teubner Foundation for the Advancement of Mathematical Sciences. He is a member of the Germany National Academy Leopoldina, the Academy of Sciences and Literature at Mainz and the Saxonian Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Max Planck School of Cognition.

Since 2016 he has been acting as a coordinating partner for the EU collaborative project ODYCCEUS - Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflicts in European Spaces.

Leonard Smith holds a PhD in Physics from Columbia University and is Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series and Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College Oxford since 1992, and became a Senior Research Fellow in the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago in 2016. His book Chaos: A Very Short Introduction is an Amazon #1 Best Seller, available in eight languages. His research interests include the real world as well as our (imperfect) models of it, leading to questions of predictability and probability in practice; he also studies the roles of science to better inform policy making. He received the Royal Meteorological Society’s Fitzroy Prize and an Australian Academy of Sciences Selby Fellowship.

Neil Stewart is a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Neil trained in Natural Sciences and Experimental Psychology at Cambridge before joining Warwick as a Psychology PhD student in 1997. Neil works in the field of behavioural and economic science, and applies this research to problems in the real world. Right now Neil is working on consumer decision making using credit card transaction data, on criminal and other bad behaviour using crime and incident records, and on a mathematical model of consumer decision making called decision by sampling. Neil uses a mixture of laboratory experiments, field experiments, and data science techniques applied to large data sets.

Aikaterini (Katerina) Fotopoulou studied psychology in Athens, Greece, before completing postgraduate studies in cognitive neuropsychology and theoretical psychoanalysis at UCL, UK. She went on to conduct her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Durham, UK and more recently, a Clinical Doctorate in Existential Counselling and Psychotherapeutic Psychology at NSPC, UK. Katerina has since published more than 100 academic papers and edited the volume A Fotopoulou, MA Conway and D Pfaff, From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in Psychodynamic Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, 2012. Her grant’s portfolio includes grants from five different countries and two grants from the European Research Council. Katerina is the founder of the International Society for the Study of Affective touch (www.iasat.org ). She has been the recipient of several international awards for her research such as the Early Career Award of the International Neuropsychology Society (2016) and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award (2014), by the World Economic Forum. 

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore holds a Chair in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, and is Leader of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group. Her group's research focuses on brain development in human adolescence. 

Professor Blakemore studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University and then did her PhD at UCL and a postdoc in Lyon, France. Between 2003 and 2016 she held a series of Royal Society Research Fellowships at UCL. She has published over 140 papers in scientific journals and won several awards for her research, including the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal 2011, the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award 2013, the Klaus J Jacobs Prize 2015 and the British Psychological Society Presidents’ Award 2018. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Blakemore is actively involved in public engagement with science activities and has an interest in the links between neuroscience and education. She was a member of the Royal Society BrainWaves working group for neuroscience, education and lifelong learning and the Royal Society Vision Committee for Science and Mathematics Education, and is a member of the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee, and she chairs the Royal Society of Biology Education and Science Policy Committee. Her book Inventing Ourselves: the secret life of the adolescent brain was published in 2018 and won the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2018.

David Tuckett is a Professor and Director of the University College London (UCL) Centre for the Study of Decision-Making under Uncertainty based in the Faculty of Brain Sciences and a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. Trained in Economics, Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis he is the author of articles and several books including Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability, based on a set of interviews with leading asset managers. Since 2010, supported by the Institute of New Economic Thinking, he has been collaborating with colleagues at UCL in economics, finance, public policy, psychology, social anthropology, computer science and neuroscience and with the Monetary Policy, Financial Stability and Research Divisions at the Bank of England to develop new ways of thinking about decision-making under radical uncertainty as well as new ways of gathering forward looking policy relevant economic information. He is on the Management group of the ESRC-NIESR Rebuilding Macroeconomics network and between 2017 and 2019 led the EPSRC funded Decision-Making Under Uncertainty Network – Challenging Radical Uncertainty in Science, Society and the Environment (CRUISSE).

Ernie Davis is Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He majored in mathematics from MIT and did a doctorate in computer science at Yale. His scientific research has focused on commonsense reasoning for artificial intelligence, particularly spatial and physical reasoning.  He has published opinion pieces and book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement. His books include the textbooks Representations of Commonsense Knowledge and Linear Algebra and Probability for Computer Science Applications, and Verses for the Information Age, a collection of light verse. With his late father Philip J. Davis, he edited Mathematics, Substance and Surmise: Views on the Meaning and Ontology of Mathematics, a multidisciplinary collection of essays.  Most recently, he is the co-author, with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, of Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.

Dr Erica Thompson is a Senior Policy Fellow at LSE's Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (www.lse.ac.uk/CATS), where her research is centred around enabling more effective use of modelling and simulation in real-world decision-making.  She has interests in the psychology and anthropology of modelling, the role of expert judgement in the development of scientific models, and the philosophical underpinnings of scientific inference.  Recent projects include a collaboration with the Start Network, a group of humanitarian NGOs seeking to use forecast information more effectively in advance of humanitarian crises.  Dr Thompson is also a Fellow of the London Mathematical Laboratory (www.lml.org.uk) where she leads a research programme on Inference from Models.  Her academic background is in physics, applied mathematics and climate science.

Dr Tobias Pforr is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. His work currently explores new financing initiatives in the world of anticipatory humanitarian action and climate change adaptation, in particular in collaboration with the International Red Cross Red Crescent movement, the UN World Food Programme, and the Overseas Development institute. He also recently completed a collaborative project between the CRUISSE and START networks in order to better conceptualize uncertainty for humanitarian assistance. Additionally, he has a research interest in how central banks should respond to climate change. 

Ben is a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS - University of London in the Anthropology Department and a Research Fellow in the SOAS Economics department on the project Trajectories of Infrastructure Financing (a part of the Rebuilding Macroeconomics hub). His current research interest in infrastructure financing practices in the UK came out of his work in 2019 on the CRUISSE network project Flexible and Reflexive Standards: Uncertainty in Decision-Making on Resilient Infrastructure; a project advising the UK Government's Cabinet Office on how to build resilience into infrastructure provision. Ben also lectures in Social Anthropology at Fordham University London, Brunel University, and the University of Roehampton. 

Dr Kris De Meyer is a research fellow in neuroscience and a visiting lecturer in the department of geography at King’s College London, specialising in how people form their beliefs and worldviews. Kris was a member of the Challenging Radical Uncertainty in Science, Society and the Environment (CRUISSE) network. For CRUISSE, and in partnership with theatre company fanSHEN, he produced Shutdown!, an immersive story experience to help the Cabinet Office understand how the public would respond to a nationwide power failure. In 2020 and 2021, Kris will be responsible for science-policy co-production in the UK-China Cooperation on Climate Change Risk Assessments, funded by the Prosperity Fund and led by Chatham House. He is also producer of the award-winning documentary Right Between Your Ears (exploring the neuroscience and psychology of entrenched views) and co-creator of part theatre, part psychology experiment, The Justice Syndicate.

David has worked at Cambridge since 1981 and was an undergraduate and postgraduate at Sussex and Cambridge. At Cambridge, he has worked in a number of different departments, and in roles in both research and education, often with public and private sector partners. For eight years, he was Education Director of the Cambridge MIT Institute. Apart the CRUISSE network, he is Director of Research for Cambridge Global Challenges, the University’s Strategic Initiative addressing the Sustainable Development Goals in developing countries, and leads in the Psychology Department the team developing interventions designed to inhibit the pathway from extreme values to violence. Much of his career has been devoted to supporting collaboration between the Arts Humanities and Social Sciences on the one hand and Science and Technology subjects on the other. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.