Michael R. Powers is the Zurich Group Professor of Risk Mathematics at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, and a 2011 recipient of China’s Qian Ren Ji Hua award.  His recent book, Acts of God and Man: Ruminations on Risk and Insurance (2012, Columbia University Press) proposes a novel science of risk based upon:

• a fundamentalist Bayesian (i.e., subjective/judgmental) approach to modeling uncertainty and assessing probabilities;

• a formal distinction between the aloof risks of insurance and the non-aloof risks of other financial markets; and

• a personalized scientific method emphasizing the importance of randomized controlled studies, mathematical and game-theoretic modeling, and statistical simulation.