2025 Risk Sciences Singapore: Keynote Speakers

Enrico Biffis

Enrico Biffis is Associate Professor of Actuarial Finance at Imperial College Business School and Academic Director of the Centre for Climate Finance and Investment. He also acts as Associate Director for Development Finance at the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis and co-director of the Sustainable Tech Lab at Imperial-X. His areas of expertise are risk analysis and asset-liability management, with a focus on applications in the insurance and investment management sectors, as well as the design of predictive analytics and risk management tools for a variety of asset classes. Dr Biffis has collaborated extensively with leading financial institutions, regulators, governmental and non-governmental organizations, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards for his research on the modelling and management of complex risks. Prior academic experience includes work as tenured faculty at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University and as an editor of ASTIN Bulletin – The Journal of the International Actuarial Association. Dr Biffis was awarded the 2023 SCOR/EGRIE Best Paper Award and the 2022 FT Responsible Business Education Research Award for his work on parametric insurance and financial inclusion.

David Blake

Dr. David Blake is a Professor in the Faculty of Finance at City St George's, University of London; Director of the Pensions Institute; and Chairman of Square Mile Consultants, a training and research consultancy. He is also: Co-Founder with JPMorgan and Towers Watson of the LifeMetrics Indices; Senior Research Associate, Financial Markets Group, London School of Economics; Senior Consultant, UBS Pensions Research Centre, London School of Economics; and Research Associate, Centre for Risk & Insurance Studies, University of Nottingham Business School. Formerly Director of the Securities Industry Programme at City University Business School; Research Fellow at both the London Business School and the London School of Economics; and Professor of Financial Economics at Birkbeck College, University of London. 

Xin CHANG (Simba)

Xin CHANG is currently a Professor of Finance at Nanyang Business School of Nanyang Technological University (NTU).  He is also the Associate Dean (Research) overseeing research issues and programs at Nanyang Business School and a co-director of the Centre for Sustainable Finance and Innovation (CSFI) at NTU.

He specializes in corporate finance, especially capital structure, innovation, corporate social responsibility, mergers and acquisitions, and equity valuation. He has taught finance courses to Undergraduates, Honours, Masters, and PhDs at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Melbourne, Nanyang Technological University, and the University of Cambridge.   

Jan Dhaene

Jan Dhaene is full professor with the Actuarial Research Group of the Department Accountancy, Finance and Insurance at the Faculty of Business and Economics of KU Leuven. He is head of the Research Centre Insurance (Actuarial Research Group) at KU Leuven, program director of the Master of Science in Financial and Actuarial Engineering (Faculty of Economics and Business and Faculty of Science, KU Leuven). His main current research interests are in modeling dependencies in insurance portfolios, incorporating stochastic financial aspects in actuarial models, risk management for financial institutions and integrating financial and actuarial models.

Katja Hanewald

Katja Hanewald is an Associate Professor in the UNSW School of Risk and Actuarial Studies and President of the Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association (APRIA). Her research focuses on longevity, healthy ageing trends and insurance strategies for ageing populations. She has published in leading journals in insurance, actuarial science, economics, and health. Katja is a Co-Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal, an Editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, and an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Risk and Insurance and the ASTIN Bulletin.

Benjamin Horton

Professor Benjamin Horton is the Dean of the School of Energy and Environment (SEE) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK). Prior to becoming Dean at SEE, he was the Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore and a Professor in Earth Science at the Asian School of the Environment in Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He has been appointed the AXA Chair in Natural Hazards. 

Professor Horton is distinguished for his research into sea-level change, significantly enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms that have determined sea-level changes in the Earth’s past, and which will shape such changes in the future. By developing new quantitative models of sea-level change and through leadership of major international research teams he has been able to formulate and test models of sea-level change in Europe, North America and Asia in both current and future climate change scenarios. Investigation of how carbon storage and coastal ecosystem stability are affected by sea-level rise have further established him as a leader in the field and to become a significant contributor to climate science communication in wider society.

Leonard Lee

Leonard Lee is Director and Lloyd’s Register Foundation Professor of Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR), and Professor of Marketing at NUS Business School, National University of Singapore (NUS). Before joining NUS in 2014, he was an Associate Professor of Marketing at Columbia Business School where he spent the first eight years of his academic career. He received a BSc in Computer and Information Sciences from NUS, a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a PhD in Management (Marketing) from the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Leonard’s research investigates how emotional and cognitive factors influence consumer judgments and decision making, with applications in public policy domains such as healthcare and sustainable transportation. Additionally, he is interested in understanding shopping motivations and behavior in real-world environments.

Moshe Arye Milevsky

Moshe Arye Milevsky is a tenured professor at Schulich and a member of the Graduate Faculty of Mathematics & Statistics at York University. His research interests are at the intersection of pensions & retirement, actuarial mathematics and the history of financial products. In addition to academic research work, he is a fin-tech entrepreneur with a number of U.S. patents and computational innovations in the field of retirement income financing.

Ruodu Wang

Dr. Ruodu Wang is Tier-1 Canada Research Chair in Quantitative Risk Management and Professor of Actuarial Science and Quantitative Finance at the University of Waterloo. He received his PhD in Mathematics (2012) from the Georgia Institute of Technology, after completing his Bachelor (2006) and Master’s (2009) degrees at Peking University. He holds editorial positions in leading journals in actuarial science, operations research and mathematical economics, including Co-Editor of the European Actuarial Journal, and Co-Editor of ASTIN Bulletin - The Journal of the International Actuarial Association. Among other international awards and recognitions, he is the first winner of the SOA Actuarial Science Early Career Award (2021) from the Society of Actuaries, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (elected 2022).

Wenfeng Wu

Prof. Wenfeng Wu currently is a Professor of Finance at the Antai College of Economics and Management, and the director of Division for Development Liberal Arts, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was recognized as the Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor of China Ministry of Education, the Youth Changjiang Scholar (among the first group receiving the distinction), awarded the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars, and selected as a New Century Excellent Talent of China Ministry of Education in 2008.

Prof. Wu is the executive editor of China Finance Review International, an English academic journal on China finance research. He is a member of Supervisory Committee for Finance Undergraduate Degree of China Ministry of Education. He is also the director of Shanghai Financial Engineering Association.

Xiaofei Xie

Dr. Xiaofei Xie is an Assistant Professor and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at Singapore Management University. He obtained his Ph.D from Tianjin University and won the CCF Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2019) in China. Previously, he was a Wallenberg-NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at NTU. His research mainly focuses on the quality assurance of both traditional software and AI-enabled software. He has published top-tier conference/journal papers in the areas of software engineering, security and AI. In particular, he has received four ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards and a APSEC Best Paper Award.

Yildiray Yildirim

Prof. Yildiray Yildirim specializes in asset pricing and risk management, with a particular focus on securitization, household finance, affordable housing, and climate risk analysis. His contributions include the development of the Jarrow-Yildirim model for inflation-linked securities and co-authoring a patent for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). He has been quoted in media outlets like U.S. News, Business Week, Real Deal, New York Times, and Bloomberg TV, as well as others.

He has experience advising leading real estate and finance companies, as well as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on risk management, strategic planning, policy development, and innovative problem-solving. His research has been published in leading academic journals, including Review of Financial Studies, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Real Estate Economics, among others.

He contributes to the academic community through editorial roles with journals such as Real Estate Economics, the Journal of Credit Risk, and the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. I am also a Fellow at the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics.

Steve Yim

Associate Professor Steve Yim serves as the Assistant Chair (Faculty) at the Asian School of the Environment, Associate Professor at both the Asian School of the Environment and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, and Director of the Center for Climate Change and Environmental Health (CCEH) at Nanyang Technological University. He is an internationally recognized leading scientist in the field of air pollution. His research interests include transboundary air pollution, interactions between land, air quality, and climate change, air quality forecasting and future projections, development and application of sensitivity models, the use of artificial intelligence in air pollution studies, remote sensing of particulate matter and ozone, air pollutant exposure science, and human health assessment.

Wei Zheng

Wei Zheng holds a Ph.D. in Economics and is a Professor and Doctoral Supervisor. He currently serves as the Head of the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at the School of Economics, Peking University, and Director of the China Center for Insurance and Social Security Research (CCISSR) at Peking University. He also holds several prominent roles, including President of the Asia-Pacific Risk and Insurance Association (APRIA), Executive Council Member of the China Insurance Society and the China Social Security Association, and Research Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of the international academic journal The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance. His primary research interests include risk management and insurance, as well as social security.

Jun Zhuang

Dr. Jun Zhuang is the Associate Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Morton C. Frank Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at the University at Buffalo (UB), which is part of the State University of New York (SUNY). Dr. Zhuang obtained his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. His primary research objective is to integrate operations research, big data analytics, game theory, and decision analysis to enhance mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery in the face of natural and man-made disasters. Additionally, he explores other domains such as healthcare, sports, transportation, supply chain management, sustainability, and architecture. Dr. Zhuang has acted as a principal investigator for more than 40 research grants, published over 160 papers in international journals, and received multiple awards for research, teaching, and service.