Guillermo Franco
Senior Vice President, Head of Catastrophe Risk Research - EMEA
Guy Carpenter
Design and coordination of Guy Carpenter's Model Suitability Analysis (MSA)SM; management
of research collaborations with partners in Academia; development of analytics products and
services.
Manager & Principal Engineer, Decision Analytics
AIR Worldwide
Risk consulting. earthquake risk assessment; damage analysis; structural vulnerability; risk
modeling; Latin America insurance/reinsurance market. Earthquake risk modeling; parametric
cat bond securitizations; earthquake vulnerability research; portfolio optimization; client & staff
training on earthquake science and engineering; sampling variability reduction processes; field
damage surveys. Manager of the EuroMediterranean earthquake model, client and employee
instruction on earthquake science and engineering.
Research Fellow
The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Research on earthquake structural vulnerability, catastrophe risk mitigation, and disaster
recovery policy. Extensive damage survey and vulnerability assessments conducted in eastern
Turkey after the Agri earthquakes. Coastal impact and recovery policy analysis in Sri Lanka after
the Indian Ocean tsunami. Development of depth-damage relationships in New Orleans after
hurricane Katrina. Railroad infrastructure risk assessment in the Bolivian Pantanal. LNG
infrastructure risk assessment in East Timor.
Alpa Sheth
Alpa Sheth is a structural engineer. She is a senior partner of VAKIL MEHTA SHETH and Managing
Director VMS Consultant Pvt. Ltd, a firm in structural engineering consultancy. She has been
advising various high level government authorties on seismic safety issues and conducted
studies of various earthquake events in India, to suggest disaster mitigation measures. She
currently act as Seismic Advisor/Consultant to Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority
(GSDMA) . She has won many national awards among which Best Residential Property
Award(2007) from CNBC Awaaz Crisil RE Award and the “Outstanding Concrete Structures
Award” (1999-2000) from the Indian Concrete Institute . She has been actively involved in
various social support projects and is Co-founder of “Structural Engineering Forum of India SEFI” (www.sefindia.org) involving more than 12,200 engineers across India. She earned her MS
from the University of California Berkeley. Alpa is a nature enthusiast and is a very avid birder.
Michelle Meyer
Michelle Meyer received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Colorado State
University (CSU) and is working as an Assistant Research Scientist at the Hazard Reduction and
Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. She has been a research assistant at the Center for
Disaster and Risk Analysis at CSU. Michelle’s dissertation research focused on the interrelation
of individual and community resilience and social vulnerability in hurricane-prone communities.
Michelle's research interests include disaster resilience and mitigation, climate change
displacement, environmental sociology and community sustainability, and the interplay
between environmental conditions and social vulnerability. Michelle has worked on various
research projects including disaster risk perception, organizational energy conservation,
volunteer training program evaluation, evaluation of disaster response plans for individuals with
disabilities, and environmental attitudes and behaviors. Her teaching interests include research
methods and statistics, sociology of disaster, environmental sociology, social stratification, and
community sociology.
She earned her BA from Murray State University in Murray, KY in Sociology and her MA from
CSU in Sociology.
Jae Chung
Jaeeun Chung is Monitoring & Evaluation Analyst in GFDRR’s Central Results Team (CRT) and the
Gender Focal Point of GFDRR. She focuses on the World Reconstruction Report, Track III Results
operationalization and gender-related disaster issues. Prior to GFDRR, she has worked at
European Union Delegation in Seoul, Korea and has assisted research in psychology and
neuroscience. A native of South Korea, she has an MA in Public Policy at Georgetown University
and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at University of Michigan.