DATA 541: Natural Hazards and Financial Risk

Role: Teaching Assistant · Fall 2026 (current)

Society’s growing exposure to the financial risks associated with natural hazards — flood, drought, extreme temperatures — has made it increasingly important both to quantify those risks accurately and to develop strategies for managing them. DATA 541 covers the fundamentals of financial risk management applied to natural hazards, with an emphasis on developing coupled models that account for natural variability, engineered and managed structures, and financial and economic factors.

Students learn to model the financial risk posed by extreme events, weigh the merits of different risk management tools, and build effective strategies for managing natural hazard-based financial risk.

As TA I support students through the modeling work, where the recurring difficulty is less the mechanics of a model than deciding what a risk estimate actually licenses you to claim — a question I run into in my own research on evaluating language models.