RMS Appoints Mary Lou Zoback as Vice President, Earthquake Risk Applications

Newark, Calif. – December 5, 2006 –  Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world’s leading provider of products and services for the management of natural hazard risk, today announced that Mary Lou Zoback has joined the firm as Vice President, Earthquake Risk Applications. A 28-year veteran of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Dr. Zoback is a highly respected geophysicist, recognized for her work on the relationship between earthquakes and state of stress in the Earth's crust.

Most recently serving as the Regional Coordinator for the USGS Northern California Earthquake Hazard Program, Dr. Zoback has been a major force in educating the public and focusing research to better elucidate earthquake hazard in the San Francisco Bay region. Accomplishments, such as her leadership efforts related to the 1906 Earthquake Centennial, have recently earned her recognition as a co-recipient of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s Northern California Chapter’s 2006 Award for Innovation and Exemplary Practice in Earthquake Risk Reduction.

“The toll of earthquakes and other natural disasters, both in terms of lives and property loss, continues to rise and overwhelm the ability of governments to respond and restore,” stated Dr. Zoback. “I am very excited to join RMS and look forward to developing new tools to encourage and expand the role of the private sector in promoting education and sound mitigation action to reduce earthquake risk.”

In her new role, Dr. Zoback will lead RMS work and outreach around earthquake risk applications and research. Her responsibilities will include helping to organize and manage earthquake hazard and risk networks, as well as building consensus among experts to develop high-quality earthquake source and earthquake risk models for new regions of the world. Dr. Zoback will also lead RMS initiatives on the significance of risk quantification for expanding the societal role of earthquake insurance, disaster management, and risk reduction activities worldwide.

“The role of catastrophe modeling is being redefined and expanded not only in the U.S. and other developed countries, but throughout South and Central America and south Asia where there is some of the greatest concentration of earthquake risk,” stated Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer of RMS. “The modeling agenda is increasingly moving to explore what can be done to implement cost effective reductions in casualties and damage and what happens in the aftermath of a major earthquake when only a minority of the damage is restituted by insurance recoveries.”