Robert Muir-Wood is the Chief Research Officer and an Executive Vice President of Risk Management Solutions. He co-founded the London office of RMS in 1996, having previously been in charge of international catastrophe model development for EQECAT.

 

He has a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences both from Cambridge University and was a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His original doctoral research was on geochemistry and high pressure low temperature metamorphism, but he then switched to work on the history of science, writing a book 'The Dark Side of the Earth - the battle for the Earth Sciences 1800-1980' (published in 1985) concerning the idea of the Earth and the origins of the theory of plate tectonics. He also worked on historical earthquake reconstructions and the methodology and research required to support probabilistic earthquake hazard assessment and was involved at the origin of the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Programme in 1989 in the development of a global understanding of information related to seismic hazard. He also worked on the seismogenetic role of postglacial rebound, and how the water released after major earthquakes allows a quantitative reconstruction of coseismic strain fields. He was the founding editor of the European Union of Geosciences Earth sciences journal Terra Nova and ran that journal from 1989-1997 writing many features and editorials. Recent scientific publications have been on probabilistic catastrophe modelling of storm surge flood, the analysis of hurricane activities and hurricane clustering and the normalization of global catastrophe losses to explore the evidence for trends. 

 

Since 1992 he has worked on the development of catastrophe loss models, leading projects to develop models for earthquake, tropical cyclone, windstorm and flood, including the first ever catastrophe models for extratropical cyclone windstorms, non hurricane storm surges and river floods. He has worked in the immediate aftermath of a number of catastrophes including the 1989 and 1994 California earthquakes, Gujarat earthquake of 2001, the 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center towers, 2004 Hurricane Ivan, 2005 Hurricane Katrina and the Great New Orleans flood. He has also given numerous presentations on catastrophe risk and catastrophe modelling.