Team

Dr. Erwan Koch (HEC and FGSE), Scientific and Executive Director of ECCE (contact: erwan.koch@unil.ch)

Before joining UNIL in June 2023 as Director of ECCE, Erwan was Bernoulli Lecturer and Researcher in Statistics at EPFL. Erwan’s research has so far mainly focused on spatial extreme-value statistics, spatial risk measures theory, and their applications to extreme weather risks. He has a true passion for weather and climate, and, using his interdisciplinary expertise, is increasingly active in trying to appropriately combine physics, statistics, machine learning, and actuarial science to improve the forecast and projection of severe weather events and of their impacts.

Dr. Ryan Cotsakis (HEC) - Research Associate (contact: ryan.cotsakis@unil.ch)

Ryan Cotsakis is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in extreme value theory, with a background in stochastic geometry and statistics. He holds a Master's degree from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and completed his PhD at Nice Université Côte d'Azur. Ryan's current research at ECCE focuses on assessing the risk of hail damage for the Canton of Vaud, applying his expertise in extreme value analysis and spatial modelling. His work contributes to developing a better understanding of extreme weather events and their potential impacts on local communities.

Dr. Amrie Singh (HEC) - Research Associate (contact: amrie.singh@unil.ch)

Amrie Singh is a postdoctoral researcher specialising in flood risk management, focusing on hydrodynamic modelling in urban, fluvial, and coastal flood contexts. Holding a PhD from the University of Leeds, Amrie was awarded the EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship Prize, allowing her to lead their research on innovative flood risk mitigation. With experience in academia and consultancy, Amrie brings a practical perspective to flood risk management challenges. A central theme throughout her career has been understanding the movement of water in both natural and built environments. Amrie’s research spans large and small-scale flood mechanisms, with a keen interest in connecting these scales to uncover valuable knowledge that can help address pressing societal challenges in flood risk. She is particularly motivated by projects that include methods of flood risk modelling, spatial planning for mitigation, and engagement with local stakeholders.

Prof. Hansjoerg Albrecher (HEC)

Hansjoerg’s research broadly deals with the modeling of risks and their diversification, particularly in the actuarial context.
He has been involved in the EU-FP7 project “Impact 2C” and various studies on flood and storm risk on the country-specific and European level, both based on recent short-time and paleo long-time horizon datasets. Some of these studies were commissioned by the insurance industry and governments. He is currently editor-in-chief of the European Actuarial Journal.

Prof. Tom Beucler (FGSE)

Tom Beucler’s research group, ∂3AWN, combines physical theory and machine learning to improve our understanding of atmospheric dynamics and assist weather & climate predictions. Extreme events are at the core of ∂3AWN’s mission, from new statistical prediction schemes for tropical cyclones to more faithful representations of severe storms for climate models. Tom is particularly interested in making data-driven models robust to climate change, with applications in Earth system modeling and risk analysis. He is an assistant professor of environmental data science at FGSE and is eager to train the next generation of scientists through computational courses so that they are well-equipped to tackle the challenges of our rapidly changing world.

Prof. Valérie Chavez (HEC)

Valérie’s research focuses on the statistical modeling of extreme events. Part of her research contributes to the field of risk assessment for non-stationary or covariate-dependent time series attempting to capture the influence of different types of dependence or causal links when estimating risk measures. She has been working at the SLF in Davos and also for the FOEN under a contract at EPFL. Among other research stays, she has often been invited as a visiting professor at the RiskLab of ETH Zurich.

Prof. Daniela Domeisen (FGSE)

Daniela’s research focuses on the prediction and projection of extreme events on timescales of weeks to decades, and how our ability to predict such events may change in a changing climate. In particular, with her research group she investigates the processes leading to heatwaves, cold extremes, rainfall extremes (both excess rainfall and drought), and storms, to then use this knowledge to improve the predictability of extreme events and the ability to issue impact-based warnings. She holds a joint position with ETH Zurich and has worked in the financial industry, evaluating the impacts of weather and climate on financial commodities.

Prof. Eric Jondeau (HEC)

Eric’s current research focuses on the impact of climate change from an economic and financial perspective. A large part of this research on transition risks is done in collaboration with financial regulators (Bank of International Settlements, Swiss National Bank, Banque de France), which can have a substantial impact on economic agents’ decisions. During his recent visit at BIS, he developed several strategies to decarbonize large investors’ portfolios.

Dr. Erwan Koch (HEC and FGSE), Scientific and Executive Director of ECCE (contact: erwan.koch@unil.ch)

Before joining UNIL in June 2023 as Director of ECCE, Erwan was Bernoulli Lecturer and Researcher in Statistics at EPFL. Erwan’s research has so far mainly focused on spatial extreme-value statistics, spatial risk measures theory, and their applications to extreme weather risks. He has a true passion for weather and climate, and, using his interdisciplinary expertise, is increasingly active in trying to appropriately combine physics, statistics, machine learning, and actuarial science to improve the forecast and projection of severe weather events and of their impacts.

Prof. Grégoire Mariethoz (FGSE)

Grégoire’s interests reside in ways of characterizing the spatial and temporal variability inherent to most hydrological
systems. This involves developing and using a variety of methods including geostatistics (in particular approaches based on training images), image analysis and inverse problems. Such methods are then applied to complex datasets like remote sensing images, hydrological time series or complex aquifers. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Computers & Geosciences and recently director of the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics at FGSE.

Prof. Nadav Peleg (FGSE)

Peleg's research group, Hydrometeorology and Surface Processes, explores the impacts of climate on hydrological and morphological systems at various spatial and temporal scales. This is accomplished through the use of experimental field sites, numerical models, and remote sensing. Their research focuses specifically on hydrological and climatic extremes, particularly extreme rainfall and flood events. In particular, Nadav is interested in the development of stochastic and physically-based models to study the impact of climate change on hydromorphological responses. He is an Eccellenza assistant professor at the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, working with colleagues from the insurance and reinsurance industries on various topics related to natural hazards and risk.

Loïc Gerber (FGSE)

Loïc Gerber is working on generating synthetic data for the Volta River Basin in West Africa. His academic journey has focused on extreme rainfall events, hydrological modeling, and remote sensing. To overcome the scarcity of pre-2000 remotely-sensed data in West Africa, Loïc’s research involves creating synthetic satellite images from 1950 to the present day. This approach aims to fill data gaps and improve long-term hydrological modeling, contributing to a better understanding of evolving hydrological processes in the context of climate change. 

Dr. Romain Pilon (FGSE)

Romain Pilon, a postdoctoral researcher with a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from Sorbonne University, specializes in the intricate connection between tropical convection and extratropical dynamics. His expertise includes deep convection, tropical cyclones, and the impacts of climate change. He contributes valuable insights to the role of convection parametrizations in the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) framework. Additionally, his work has involved developing a theoretical perspective on the vertical distribution of Saharan dust.

Dr. Pauline Rivoire (FGSE)

Pauline is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Daniela Domeisen. Her current research project focuses on the identification of the hydro-meteorological conditions triggering forest damage in Europe and the prediction of such conditions on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales. During her PhD, she studied precipitation extremes, assessing precipitation intensity and occurrence in reanalysis and hindcast datasets over Europe and globally.

Lucas Schmutz (FGSE)

Lucas Schmutz is a PhD student at the Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics (IDYST) at the University of Lausanne. Under the supervision of Professor Gregoire Mariethoz, Lucas aims to enhance the reliability of climate projections by accounting for the local performance of global climate models. His work focuses on novel statistical approaches to combine multiple models, aiming to preserve their spatial characteristics and the dependencies between variables. These innovations aim to produce more physically realistic and less biased climate projections, informing better local adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Frederick Iat-Hin Tam (FGSE)

Frederick Iat-Hin Tam, a Ph.D. student in Tom Beucler's ∂3AWN research group, has a background in traditional meteorology, remote sensing, and high-resolution weather modeling. Frederick's interest in severe weather stems from chasing tornadoes in the U.S. Great Plains during his undergraduate studies at National Taiwan University. His current research primarily focuses on (1) the use of data-driven methodologies to discover new physics from data, and (2) the use of machine learning to improve the prediction skills of existing weather models. In his Ph.D. work, he developed a transparent pattern discovery method to find patterns useful in predicting the formation of tropical cyclones, and took part in developing a causal feature selection method that can potentially improve the skills of existing statistical tropical cyclone intensity models.

Qi Zhuang (FGSE)

Qi Zhuang is a visiting PhD student from Tongji University, and she joined the group of Prof. Nadav Peleg at FGSE for the next two years. She is interested in urban extreme rainfall, including rainfall spatio-temporal variability at different scales, rainfall frequency analysis and satellite data downscaling. Her current research focuses on understanding the impact of urbanization and climate change on urban extremes, using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with urban schemes.

Wenyue Zou (FGSE)

Wenyue is a PhD student from the group of Prof. Nadav Peleg at the FGSE. She is interested in extreme rainfall and flood risk under climate change and urbanization. Within the research project "Future changes in rainfall properties and their effects on urban flooding", she focuses on geostatistical downscaling, extreme rainfall statistics, and hydrological modelling to explore how the extreme storms will change with global warming and to simulate future flood risk in cities. This work will contribute to the scientific knowledge about future storm and flood forecast, and help to prevent disasters and mitigate urban flooding in the future.