Organizing Committee:

Alwynelle Ahl
C. Richard Cothern
Louis Anthony Cox
Janice Longstreth
Ana T. Maturam
Berhanu Tameru
James D Wilson

Risk analysis is the process of assessing, managing and communicating risks. It is an established profession with books about the subject, several journals focused on it, and learned societies devoted to it. Because of the ubiquitous nature of risk, risk analysis is inherently an interdisciplinary subject with many content-specific applications in engineering, finance, health, transportation, and so forth.

Yet, only a few graduate schools (e.g., Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Texas at Austin) even have course coverage of risk analysis. Even fewer have academic programs that focus on risk-related subjects and offer graduate degrees in risk analysis or closely aligned disciplines (e.g., Carnegie Mellon University). In addition, several commercial and governmental courses in risk analysis exist, but they almost universally take a narrow, content-specific view of risk analysis in some area of application, such as solid waste sites or agriculture. Because these courses offer useful, but practice-specific education, they often represent organizational policies as risk analysis, frustrating students who seek more fundamental and flexible understanding. Further, professionals in many fields learn risk analysis on the job. Their experience also is limited to practices that are specific to applications of risk analysis. In addition, their opportunities to learn often meld organizational policies with the theoretical underpinnings of risk analysis. They often have no opportunity to extend their understanding and to obtain a more comprehensive view of risk analysis.

To fill the needs of graduate students (or recent graduates) and of professionals with some practical experience, the Organizing Committee wants to present a course that separates content-specific information from the underlying theory and that contrasts case studies drawn from different areas of application. To achieve this objective, the Organizing Committee proposes a syllabus that essentially mixes two kinds of lectures: approximately thirty (30) lectures that cover the basic principles of risk analysis, and approximately twenty (20) lectures that address advanced topics in more detail.

We will base the lectures about basic principles primarily on a recent textbook, Introduction to Risk Analysis: A Systematic Approach to Science-Based Decision Making. (ISBN 0-86587-696-7) Government Institutes, Rockville, MD, pp. 433 (2000). The Organizing Committee plans to distribute a copy of this text to each student and will jointly administer lectures that cover the basic principles in this text. Each member of the Organizing Committee will give lectures about advanced topics in their sphere of expertise.