Source: RISK newsletter,
Second Quarter 1996, published by the Society for Risk Analysis
The Society’s 1995 Awards Committee, chaired by former SRA president D. Warner North and including past presidents Paul F. Deisler, Paul Slovic, and Chris G. Whipple, announced at the 1995 Annual Meeting in Honolulu that five of the Society’s members had been chosen to receive the award of Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis. The award recognizes members whose professional records are marked by significant contributions to any of the disciplines served by the Society. The five recipients are as follows:
Kenny S. Crump. A vice-president of ICF-Kaiser International, Crump has worked in the development of risk assessment methodology and in the performance of risk assessments for over 20 years and has developed procedures, including the linearized multistage model for cancer risk assessment and the benchmark procedure for risk assessment of non-cancer effects, that have been widely applied. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Science and on the science advisory boards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California EPA, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and National Center for Toxicological Research. His current professional interests include the development and application of innovative methodologies for risk analysis and the promotion of improved practices in risk assessment.
A charter member of SRA, he has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Montana State University and has served as a professor of mathematics and statistics at Louisiana Tech University and as president of an environmental risk assessment company which he founded.
Ann N. Fisher. A senior research associate in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University, with a joint appointment in the Environmental Resources Research Institute, Fisher works with interdisciplinary teams on how risk perceptions affect individuals’ decisions and well being and how people make decisions involving health or environmental risks and change their judgments when new information becomes available. She also evaluates the effectiveness of alternative ways of presenting information, especially about environmental risks. The results provide guidance to government and industry officials responsible for communicating about various risks to health and the environment. Her current research also includes how to communicate effectively about small risks, how to evaluate the effectiveness of risk information programs, and how to measure values of non-market goods ranging from ground water to unique ecosystems.
A charter member of SRA, she was the recepient of the Society’s Distinguished Service Award in 1991. She initiated the Risk Communication Specialty Group, which she chaired for four years. She has also served on the council and on several annual meeting program committees, and is currently a member of the SRA Advisory Board. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Connecticut and has taught economics at the State University of New York, Fredonia. In addition, she has analyzed the benefits of environmental regulations at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and has managed EPA’s Risk Communication Program.
Roger E. Kasperson. Provost at Clark University since 1992 and a senior researcher at the Center for Technology, Environment, and Development (CENTED) and the George Perkins Marsh Institute, Kasperson has written numerous books and monographs on technological risks, risk communication, risk policy, radioactive wastes, and global environmental change, including his latest book Regions at Risk: Comparison of Threatened Environments (United Nations University Press, 1995). He chairs the International Geographical Union’s Commission on Critical Environmental Situations and Regions and is a member of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Global Environmental Change Research. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been honored for his work on environmental hazards by the Association of American Geographers. He has served on various committees of the National Research Council and the National Science Foundation and the subcommittee on risk reduction strategies for the Science Advisory Board’s report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Reducing Risk: Setting Priorities and Strategies for Environmental Protection (1992).
A charter member of SRA, Kasperson has served on the council, was general program chair of the 1986 SRA Annual Meeting, and has served on the editorial board of Risk Analysis. He has a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Chicago.
Ralph L. Keeney. A professor of systems management at the University of Southern California, Keeney has been a consultant for several private and public organizations addressing decisions about large-scale siting studies, energy policy, environmental and risk studies, and corporate management problems. He is the co-author (with Howard Raiffa) of the book Decisions with Multiple Objectives (reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 1993) and the author of Value-Focused Thinking (Harvard University Press, 1992). In 1995, Keeney was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. His current research includes quantitatively examining the implications of the “richer is safer” phenomenon in order to develop models that estimate the fatalities induced by expensive regulations, with the intent to include those fatalities in estimating the full range of consequences of existing and proposed regulations and to provide guidance for a reasonable value trade-off between public funds spent and statistical lives saved for regulatory decision making.
A charter member of SRA, he has a Ph.D. in operations research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was also a professor in engineering and in management. He was a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the founder of the decision and risk analysis group for a geotechnical and environmental consulting firm.
M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell. Professor of industrial engineering and engineering management at Stanford University and the immediate past president of SRA, Paté-Cornell specializes in risk analysis, engineering reliability, engineering and environmental risk management, engineering economy, and decision analysis. With years of consulting and public service experience, she has served on several committees of the National Research Council and National Science Foundation and has published many articles on risk analysis and related topics in scientific journals, including Risk Analysis.
In 1989, Paté-Cornell received the Best Paper Award of the American Nuclear Society’s Reactor Safety Division. She was a Stanford University Fellow from 1989 to 1991 and is currently an elected member of the Stanford University Senate. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995. Her recent work has focused on the organizational and managerial aspects of systems safety with applications to the management of jacket-type offshore platforms and the space shuttle’s heat shield.
A member of SRA since 1981, she has served on the council and
is a past president of the Northern California Chapter. She holds
a Ph.D. in engineering-economic systems from Stanford and was
previously an assistant professor of civil engineering at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.