Team

Dr. Erwan Koch (HEC and FGSE), Scientific and Executive Director of ECCE (contact: erwan.koch@unil.ch)

Before joining UNIL in June 2023 as Director of ECCE, Erwan was Bernoulli Lecturer and Researcher in Statistics at EPFL. Erwan’s research has so far mainly focused on spatial extreme-value statistics, spatial risk measures theory, and their applications to extreme weather risks. He has a true passion for weather and climate, and, using his interdisciplinary expertise, is increasingly active in trying to appropriately combine physics, statistics, machine learning, and actuarial science to improve the forecast and projection of severe weather events and of their impacts.

Prof. Hansjoerg Albrecher (HEC)

Hansjoerg’s research broadly deals with the modeling of risks and their diversification, particularly in the actuarial context.
He has been involved in the EU-FP7 project “Impact 2C” and various studies on flood and storm risk on the country-specific and European level, both based on recent short-time and paleo long-time horizon datasets. Some of these studies were commissioned by the insurance industry and governments. He is currently editor-in-chief of the European Actuarial Journal.

Prof. Tom Beucler (FGSE)

Tom Beucler’s research group, ∂3AWN, combines physical theory and machine learning to improve our understanding of atmospheric dynamics and assist weather & climate predictions. Extreme events are at the core of ∂3AWN’s mission, from new statistical prediction schemes for tropical cyclones to more faithful representations of severe storms for climate models. Tom is particularly interested in making data-driven models robust to climate change, with applications in Earth system modeling and risk analysis. He is an assistant professor of environmental data science at FGSE and is eager to train the next generation of scientists through computational courses so that they are well-equipped to tackle the challenges of our rapidly changing world.

Prof. Valérie Chavez (HEC)

Valérie’s research focuses on the statistical modeling of extreme events. Part of her research contributes to the field of risk assessment for non-stationary or covariate-dependent time series attempting to capture the influence of different types of dependence or causal links when estimating risk measures. She has been working at the SLF in Davos and also for the FOEN under a contract at EPFL. Among other research stays, she has often been invited as a visiting professor at the RiskLab of ETH Zurich.

Prof. Daniela Domeisen (FGSE)

Daniela’s research focuses on the prediction and projection of extreme events on timescales of weeks to decades, and how our ability to predict such events may change in a changing climate. In particular, with her research group she investigates the processes leading to heatwaves, cold extremes, rainfall extremes (both excess rainfall and drought), and storms, to then use this knowledge to improve the predictability of extreme events and the ability to issue impact-based warnings. She holds a joint position with ETH Zurich and has worked in the financial industry, evaluating the impacts of weather and climate on financial commodities.

Prof. Eric Jondeau (HEC)

Eric’s current research focuses on the impact of climate change from an economic and financial perspective. A large part of this research on transition risks is done in collaboration with financial regulators (Bank of International Settlements, Swiss National Bank, Banque de France), which can have a substantial impact on economic agents’ decisions. During his recent visit at BIS, he developed several strategies to decarbonize large investors’ portfolios.

Dr. Erwan Koch (HEC and FGSE), Scientific and Executive Director of ECCE (contact: erwan.koch@unil.ch)

Before joining UNIL in June 2023 as Director of ECCE, Erwan was Bernoulli Lecturer and Researcher in Statistics at EPFL. Erwan’s research has so far mainly focused on spatial extreme-value statistics, spatial risk measures theory, and their applications to extreme weather risks. He has a true passion for weather and climate, and, using his interdisciplinary expertise, is increasingly active in trying to appropriately combine physics, statistics, machine learning, and actuarial science to improve the forecast and projection of severe weather events and of their impacts.

Prof. Grégoire Mariethoz (FGSE)

Grégoire’s interests reside in ways of characterizing the spatial and temporal variability inherent to most hydrological
systems. This involves developing and using a variety of methods including geostatistics (in particular approaches based on training images), image analysis and inverse problems. Such methods are then applied to complex datasets like remote sensing images, hydrological time series or complex aquifers. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Computers & Geosciences and recently director of the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics at FGSE.

Prof. Nadav Peleg (FGSE)

Peleg's research group, Hydrometeorology and Surface Processes, explores the impacts of climate on hydrological and morphological systems at various spatial and temporal scales. This is accomplished through the use of experimental field sites, numerical models, and remote sensing. Their research focuses specifically on hydrological and climatic extremes, particularly extreme rainfall and flood events. In particular, Nadav is interested in the development of stochastic and physically-based models to study the impact of climate change on hydromorphological responses. He is an Eccellenza assistant professor at the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, working with colleagues from the insurance and reinsurance industries on various topics related to natural hazards and risk.

Loïc Gerber (FGSE)

Loïc Gerber is working on generating synthetic data for the Volta River Basin in West Africa. His academic journey has focused on extreme rainfall events, hydrological modeling, and remote sensing. To overcome the scarcity of pre-2000 remotely-sensed data in West Africa, Loïc’s research involves creating synthetic satellite images from 1950 to the present day. This approach aims to fill data gaps and improve long-term hydrological modeling, contributing to a better understanding of evolving hydrological processes in the context of climate change. 

Dr. Romain Pilon (FGSE)

Romain Pilon, a postdoctoral researcher with a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from Sorbonne University, specializes in the intricate connection between tropical convection and extratropical dynamics. His expertise includes deep convection, tropical cyclones, and the impacts of climate change. He contributes valuable insights to the role of convection parametrizations in the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) framework. Additionally, his work has involved developing a theoretical perspective on the vertical distribution of Saharan dust.

Dr. Pauline Rivoire (FGSE)

Pauline is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Daniela Domeisen. Her current research project focuses on the identification of the hydro-meteorological conditions triggering forest damage in Europe and the prediction of such conditions on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales. During her PhD, she studied precipitation extremes, assessing precipitation intensity and occurrence in reanalysis and hindcast datasets over Europe and globally.

Lucas Schmutz (FGSE)

Lucas Schmutz is a PhD student at the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics (IDYST) at the University of Lausanne. Under the supervision of Professor Gregoire Mariethoz, Lucas aims to enhance the reliability of climate projections by accounting for the local performance of global climate models. His work focuses on novel statistical approaches to combine multiple models, aiming to preserve their spatial characteristics and the dependencies between variables. These innovations aim to produce more physically realistic and less biased climate projections, informing better local adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Frederick Iat-Hin Tam (FGSE)

Frederick Iat-Hin Tam, a Ph.D. student in Tom Beucler's ∂3AWN research group, has a background in traditional meteorology, remote sensing, and high-resolution weather modeling. Frederick's interest in severe weather stems from chasing tornadoes in the U.S. Great Plains during his undergraduate studies at National Taiwan University. His current research primarily focuses on (1) the use of data-driven methodologies to discover new physics from data, and (2) the use of machine learning to improve the prediction skills of existing weather models. In his Ph.D. work, he developed a transparent pattern discovery method to find patterns useful in predicting the formation of tropical cyclones, and took part in developing a causal feature selection method that can potentially improve the skills of existing statistical tropical cyclone intensity models.

Qi Zhuang (FGSE)

Qi Zhuang is a visiting PhD student from Tongji University, and she joined the group of Prof. Nadav Peleg at FGSE for the next two years. She is interested in urban extreme rainfall, including rainfall spatio-temporal variability at different scales, rainfall frequency analysis and satellite data downscaling. Her current research focuses on understanding the impact of urbanization and climate change on urban extremes, using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with urban schemes.

Wenyue Zou (FGSE)

Wenyue is a PhD student from the group of Prof. Nadav Peleg at the FGSE. She is interested in extreme rainfall and flood risk under climate change and urbanization. Within the research project "Future changes in rainfall properties and their effects on urban flooding", she focuses on geostatistical downscaling, extreme rainfall statistics, and hydrological modelling to explore how the extreme storms will change with global warming and to simulate future flood risk in cities. This work will contribute to the scientific knowledge about future storm and flood forecast, and help to prevent disasters and mitigate urban flooding in the future.

Dr. Dominique Berod (WMO)

Dominique Berod is the Head of the Earth System monitoring Division at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He is responsible for WMO activities on water, cryosphere and ocean monitoring and information systems, supporting global efforts for, e.g., climate resilience and early warning systems. He is member of steering boards related to global data centers and geospatial networks related to climate, water and environment, and cooperates closely with the Global Climate Observing System GCOS.

Dr. Isabelle Bey (MeteoSwiss)

Isabelle Bey is the Head of the Western Regional Center and a member of the Extended Management of MeteoSwiss. Together with her team and in close collaboration with the other MeteoSwiss forecasting centers, she is responsible for general and aeronautical forecasting for western Switzerland (Romandie & Valais), and in particular for issuing warnings in the case of severe weather. She joined MeteoSwiss in 2016. Prior to this, she managed the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) at ETH Zurich as Executive Director and led a research group in the field of atmospheric chemistry & climate interaction modeling at EPFL.

Prof. Anthony Davison (EPFL)

Anthony has been Professor of Statistics at EPFL since 1996.  He has published widely on statistical theory and methods and been editor of major statistics journals. His research on topics related to risk and extreme values spans four decades and a wide range of topics within the area, including applications ranging from nuclear safety to the modelling of extremes of environmental variables such as rain, snow, windstorms and hail impacts.

Christian Gerber (Etat de Vaud)

Christian Gerber is a geologist and head of the Natural Hazards Unit of the Canton of Vaud, which is responsible for prevention to protect people and property against natural hazards and disasters. It acquires basic data, analyses the territory and assesses the risks in exposed areas. It finances and participates in research projects at UNIL and HEIG-VD on the effects of climate change, in particular the variability of the aforementioned data and their use in integrated risk management. Prior to this, Christian was seconded for many years by Swiss Humanitarian Aid to Unicef and UNHCR to work on water, hygiene and sanitation projects.

Prof. Michael Lehning (WSL and EPFL)

Michael Lehning is the joint WSL / EPFL Professor for Cryospheric Sciences and Snow Processes and heads the CRYOS and the “Snow Processes” groups at Lausanne and SLF Davos. His major research areas include: Interaction Snow - Atmosphere; Natural Hazards Forecasting and Extreme Events; Turbulence and Boundary Layer Flows and Wind and Solar Renewable Energy. Based on his modelling and measurement expertise, he has made significant contributions to understanding of snow – terrain – atmosphere interactions in extreme environments.

Prof. Stéphane Loisel

Stéphane Loisel is now professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Cnam) in Paris, in charge of the chair in Actuarial Science and Science of Risk, and a member of Lirsa. Former head of LSAF research lab in Lyon, Stéphane has been lecturing at UNIL for several years. His main research interests include climate change and insurance, sustainability, ruin theory with dependent risks, Solvency II, regulation and ERM, as well as longevity risk. He is the PI of the research chair "Sustainable actuarial science and climate risks" sponsored by Milliman Paris.

Dr. Laurent Marescot (Moody's RMS)

Laurent Marescot is a catastrophe risk management expert at Moody's RMS, advising major players in the re/insurance industry on natural catastrophe, agriculture, cyber, and terrorism risk management. He also serves as an expert for governmental and regulatory authorities, and is a member of the EIOPA Technical Expert Network on Catastrophe Risk. Laurent initially joined RMS in 2008, focusing on the European (re)insurance and ILS market. He later became the Head of Product Management for Climate/Weather Risk (EMEA & APAC) and Global Agricultural Risk. In recent years, his activities have centered on developing new markets and segments in EMEA. Prior to RMS, Laurent worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) as a Research Associate and Lecturer, managing geophysics research projects. He frequently lectures on catastrophe modeling and insurance risk quantification and speaks at international industry conferences.

Dr. Philippe Naveau (LSCE)

Philippe is a CNRS senior researcher at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement. His research interests are extreme-value theory, time series analysis, spatial statistics with main applications in statistical climatology and hydrology. He has been part of various national and international grants dealing with climate extremes analysis and statistical modelling.

Prof. Martine Rebetez (WSL and UNINE)

Martine Rebetez is full professor in applied climatology, for the joint professorship of the WSL Swiss Federal Research Institute and of the University of Neuchatel (UNINE). She leads the Master studies in Geography, climate change and societies at UNINE. Her main research interests are climate change, observed climate change in Switzerland, in mountain regions and in Europe, impacts of temperature increase on snow packs and snow precipitation, impacts of climate change on societies in general, more specifically on agriculture, viticulture and forests as well as on mountain tourism.

Prof. Olivia Rompainnen-Martius (UNIBE)

Olivia is professor for Climate Impact Research at the University of Bern since 2010 and co-director of the Mobiliar Lab for Natural Risks. In the Mobiliar Lab they work interdisciplinary and combine information on hazards, exposure and vulnerability to provide risk assessments for Switzerland. The research focus of her group is on the dynamics and statistics of extreme weather in Switzerland and worldwide. They study hail, heavy precipitation and the subsequent formation of surface water floods, atmospheric rivers  and river flooding, and windstorms.

Prof. Sonia Seneviratne (ETHZ)

Sonia Seneviratne is Full Professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich. Her research addresses climate change and extreme events, land-climate interactions, and land water processes. She is IPCC Working Group I Vice-chair for the 7th Assessment Cycle of IPCC (2023-2030). She has been a Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author on several IPCC reports, including the IPCC Special Report on Extreme events (SREX, 2012), the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C Global warming (2018), and the IPCC 6thAssessment report (2021). Sonia Seneviratne is the recipient of the Hans Oeschger Medal from the European Geosciences Union (2021) and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Utrecht University (2023).

Prof. Michael Tippett (Columbia University)

Michael Tippett is an Associate Professor in the department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. His climate research includes detection and attribution of climate change, decadal prediction of Atlantic sea surface temperatures, and seasonal forecasts of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as well as seasonal outlooks for temperature and precipitation for coming months. On shorter weather time-scales, Michael investigates how severe thunderstorms (those resulting in tornadoes, hail, or damaging wind) and tropical cyclones are related to climate, now and in the future. He is a co-author of the 2022 textbook Statistics for Climate Scientists.

Dr. Marc Wüest (Swiss Re)

Marc Wüest is a senior natural catastrophe model developer with more than 15 years of experience in this field for the Swiss Re proprietary platform.  Building in the impacts of climate change and variability has been an essential part of this work, in Marc's case especially for tropical cyclone models.  With a strong focus on the uncertainty and financial modules of the cat models, partnerships with academia - as with this Advisory Board - and tech companies have been absolutely relevant.  Marc is also lecturer a ETH Zurich and University for Teacher Education in Zug (climate, atmospheric physics / chemistry, mathematics).