Risk and Uncertainty

Academic Lead: Professor John Mottershead

The nature and consequences of disasters, hazards and other real world problems are becoming increasingly complex, due to the many different kinds of disciplines that are involved.

Think of hurricane Katrina, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Fukushima nuclear incident or the global financial crisis, in which failures in technical and management systems caused a cascade of interrelated effects in technological, infrastructural, environmental, financial and social systems.

Subsequently, industrial challenges and projects are of rapidly growing complexity and involve uncertainties and risks to a greater extent than ever before. If not appropriately considered, quantified, processed, assessed and communicated, this can result in tragic and long-lasting consequences to our society, environment and economy.

To fully understand and address these challenges, and to reduce or prevent its consequences at a global scale, we need to work together - at the intersection of disciplines.

Key Facilities and Centres

The Institute for Risk and Uncertainty offers cutting-edge expertise and methodologies with which to quantify, mitigate and manage risk and uncertainty in many fields and industry sectors.

Our multidisciplinary research team includes experts from engineering, architecture, environmental sciences, financial and actuarial mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering and electronics, economics and finance, social sciences, psychology and law.

This gives us a large and unique pool of methodologies, tools and experience to explore the issues of risk and resilience associated with building design, climate analysis, reliability engineering, software reliability and materials science. Our work also touches on financial modelling, methods to reduce any socio-political harm and critical incident management.

Our Institute for Financial and Actuarial Mathematics works to enhance, support and stimulate research in corresponding mathematical techniques which have become increasingly important to banks and insurance companies.

We bring together expertise in the area of monetary economics, finance, banking and econometrics. Our experts have a proven track record in the areas of risk and probability theory and stochastic control theory with applications in the insurance and finance industries. We also have expertise in the analysis of complex financial and economic systems to model risk and identify the potential impacts of any failures in multi-agent, macro-scale systems.