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CEE 298 Seminar - Unveiling the Engineer's Playground: When Engineering Meets Insurance

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ABSTRACT

Financial risk management decisions, with billions of dollars in property assets at stake, often rely on incomplete information and social networks within the Property & Commercial Insurance realm. Risk Engineering emerges as a pivotal resource tasked with identifying potential “red flags” in existing properties and new projects seeking insurance coverage.

This presentation offers a comprehensive exploration of the contemporary commercial property insurance landscape, illuminating the pivotal roles engineers can play in aiding insurance companies to navigate risk in construction projects and existing properties. Whether conducting analytical studies from behind the desk or embarking on site visits to gather firsthand insights, engineers have a myriad of avenues to contribute to a nuanced understanding of risk. These contributions profoundly influence financial decisions, and the multidisciplinary nature of the work equips engineers with versatility to address real-world challenges effectively. By examining real-world examples, we will illustrate how risk engineering facilitates tailored understanding, ultimately enhancing financial decision-making within the insurance industry.

BIOS

Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (BHSI) is a relatively new commercial Property & Casualty Insurer that was started within Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway organization in 2013. The Risk Engineering team is a dedicated and interdisciplinary team in BHSI to help make better risk management decisions for itself and its customers by evaluating the project specific risk.

Shanshan Wang, Ph.D., P.E., serves as a Risk Engineer at BHSI. Shanshan’s work focuses on evaluating the construction risk of industrial and commercial projects from a property insurance perspective. Shanshan’s expertise and research experiences focuses on evaluating the seismic performance of tall buildings in the west coast of the United States, and exploring cost-effective retrofit strategies for buildings that have inadequate seismic resistance. She obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Structural Engineering at University of California, Berkeley in 2017.

Shanshan desires to bridge the gap between the engineering, academic, and insurance worlds, and is actively involved in the engineering community, collaboration with leading academic research institutions and insurance industry organizations.

 

Doug Johnson, Vice President, is the head of the North American Energy & Construction Risk Engineering team. Doug graduated in 1995 from the Fire Protection Engineering Technology Program at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Doug began his insurance career in 1997 and spent many years conducting field assessments of heavy industrial risks across the U.S., Canada, South America and the U.K. with a variety of well-known Property Insurance companies.

Doug came to BHSI shortly after the organization was founded and is proud to have overseen the development and growth of a unique and highly specialized, multi-disciplinary Risk Engineering team in North America while also influencing BHSI’s greater global Risk Engineering practice.

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