Marie-Valentine Florin recognized by the Society for Risk Analysis
© Marie-Valentine Florin / EPFL
Marie-Valentine Florin, the executive director of EPFL’s International Risk Governance Center (IRGC@EPFL), has been named a Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis for her contribution to the field of risk analysis.
Each year, the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) recognizes researchers’ work and contributions to the science of risk analysis through seven awards and a special category of members called Fellows.
On Wednesday, Marie-Valentine Florin was named one of the SRA’s new Fellows for 2019, recognizing her “major scientific and public-policy achievements in the field of risk analysis, and her services to the Society.”
Ms. Florin’s focus at IRGC is on risks related to new technologies. This past year, her work centered on machine learning and synthetic biology. These two topics present new types of risk, given the speed at which applications of these technologies are being developed.
“I’m trying to take a wider view of risk by also considering the opportunities that these new technologies represent. I think that, to carry out a proper analysis, you have to look carefully at the causes of the risk, without ignoring factors such as cultural variation,” she explains. “It’s also my job to establish a link between risk analysis and public policy making.”
Official announcement by the SRA
About the SRA and IRGC
The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) was established in 1980, and its international chapter currently has almost 2,000 members. The SRA is a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and international society that provides an open forum for all those who are interested in risk analysis.
IRGC was created by EPFL in 2017 to serve as a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue on complex, uncertain and ambiguous risks – which are often a counterpart to opportunities. The aim is to give policymakers the information they need to make decisions based on solid scientific and technological foundations.