Roger Cooke

Roger Cooke is a senior fellow emeritus at Resources for the Future (RFF) and an expert-on-expert judgment, uncertainty analysis, high-dimensional dependence modeling, and value of information, especially for climate observing satellites. Notable recent publications address validation of expert forecasters, ice sheet contributions to sea level rise, value of information for climate observing systems, probabilistic reasoning about equilibrium climate sensitivity, global burden of disease, invasive species, fat-tailed distributions, insurance for fat-tailed risks, and market methods for valuing uncertainty reduction. He was a lead author on the chapter on risk and uncertainty in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His books on expert judgment, risk analysis, and dependence modeling figure prominently in two recent compendiums on expert elicitation and risk analysis. Prior to joining RFF in September 2005 as the first appointee to the Chauncey Starr Chair in Risk Analysis, Cooke was professor of applied decision theory at the Department of Mathematics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He launched a master’s program in risk and environmental modeling and led the development of Bayes Nets software UNINET for high-dimensional distributions under contract with the Dutch Ministry of Environment, Shell, and AIRBUS (free for academics). Graduating Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from Yale University (Philosophy and Mathematics), he received the Oeuvre Award for Risk Management (2005) and the Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award (2011) from the Society for Risk Analysis.