Plenary Sessions

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

John Curtin, Environment Agency, UK
John Curtin has worked for the Environment Agency (EA) since it was formed in 1996. He was appointed as Executive Director of Flood and Coastal Risk Management in March 2016 having been Acting Executive Director since September 2015.
Previous to this John was Director of Incident Management & Resilience where he was responsible for developing the organisation’s ability to respond to flood and environmental incidents.
John’s earlier roles in the Environment Agency include Area Manager for the East Midlands, Regional Flood Executive & Head of Water Resources Regulation. He has been a commissioner of the UK Met Office and sat on the Forestry Commission’s Regional Advisory Board. John is a Hydrologist by training and began his career working on Water Resource planning and flood forecast modelling.

Prof Ikeuchi, University of Tokyo, Japan
Dr.KojiIkeuchi is a professor of the Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Tokyo. He is a scientist and a practitioner. As a civil engineer of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) of Japan, he was in charge of flood control measures and management of natural disasters for many years. From 2014 to 2015 he was the Director- General of the Water and Disaster Management Bureau, and from 2015 to 2016, he was the Vice-Minister for Engineering Affairs of MLIT. He has many experiences related to the planning of the flood control policy of Japan, establishment and revision of related laws, actual flood control measures on site, emergency response at the time of disaster. His current research topics focuses on flood risk assessment, structural and non-structural flood mitigation measures, river management.

DrGero Michel, Chaucer plc, London, UK
Dr. Michel is the Managing Director of Chaucer Underwriting A/S in Copenhagen, DK, as part of Chaucer Underwriting and the Hanover Insurance Group where he is responsible for Chaucer’s European treaty portfolio and capital market initiative. He joined Chaucer in February 2016. In addition Dr. Michel serves as an adjunct professor at Western University, London Ontario, Canada where his lectures include Insurance and Reinsurance as well as creation of catastrophe models. Gero Michel is co-founder of the Chaucer Risk and Research Center that links innovation and science to underwriting. Before this Gero was Senior Vice President, CRO and Head of Risk Analytics of Montpelier Re. where he was responsible for risk analytics, a task that involves innovations in risk management, underwriting strategy, risk reporting, as well as the Montpelier Group’s own view of risk and risk modelling and liaison with external knowledge centres, brokers, and scientists globally. There he played a leading role in the analytics and underwriting strategy of Blue Capital, Montpelier’s fund initiative. Prior to joining the Montpelier Group, Dr. Michel was Managing Director of the largest existing joint venture between science and the financial industry, the Willis Research network, along with heading up model development at Willis in London. Prior to this, Dr. Michel headed up international cat underwriting at Endurance Specialty Holdings Ltd., in Bermuda; led the windstorm and flood model development at Risk Management Solutions, Inc. and was a senior actuarial analyst at Hannover Re. Dr. Michel has a PhD and masters in geo-science, was lecturer at Freiberg University in Germany, had a career in geoscience and has a senior level education from Harvard Business School. He has been an invited lecturer at numerous insurance and science events, has published various risk and insurance articles, and has been invited to various panel discussions on risk and catastrophe management. He has over 30 years of experience in risk management and risk modelling.

Dr Paul Whitfield, Environment Canada, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Paul is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan after retiring from Environment Canada in 2010 and an adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University. His core areas of scientific expertise are applications of statistics to the analysis of environmental data, transient events, the design and implementation of monitoring programs, quality assurance and quality control, hydrological processes, and the hydrology of cold regions. Most recently focused on climate change and changes in land use and the impacts on hydrology and climatology. Current research interests are “focused” on [1] the analysis of trends and changes in floods and flood processes. [2] climatic controls flows in intermittent streams, [3] the sensitivity of ecological processes to climate, particularly the impact of weather and climate on peatland hydrology, and [4] uncertainty of measurements and model predictions.

Prof Zevenbergen UNESCO-IHE, The Netherlands
Chris Zevenbergen is professor at the Water Engineering Department of UNESCO-IHE and at TuDelft, The Netherlands. He is also a visiting professor at the Southeast University (SEU), China, and project director of DeltaCap, a Dutch funded capacity development program to support the implementation of the Delta Plan in Bangladesh. In the past 20 years he has accumulated extensive national and international experience with integrated approaches to manage floods in urban environments. His research interest is specifically on innovative concepts to mitigate urban flood impacts, on flood proofing building designs and technologies and on decision support tool development in urban planning with practical application in urban flood management. He has published/edited five books and more than 100 scientific publications in the field of environmental engineering and urban flood management. He was co-founder and chairman of the European Network COST C22 on Urban Flood Management.

Mr. Haibin Wan State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, China
The office is set in the Ministry of Water Resources(MWR) and  responsible for the emergency management of flood control and drought relief, and undertakes routine work of the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, including organizing, coordinating, supervising and directing the work of flood control and drought relief, regulating flood control and drought relief in major rivers and key water projects as well as emergency water allocation, preparing and implementing national emergency plans for flood control and drought relief; Provide guidance on emergency treatment of water hazards.

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