About James
Dr.-Ing. James Daniell is a civil engineer, geophysicist and geologist specialising in global stochastic and real-time financial, social and environmental risk modelling for insurance and governments; as well as global data analytics, exposure and socioeconomic models. As of 2022, he currently works from Adelaide in Australia after spending the last 14 years in Europe. He works on global projects as a Senior Disaster Risk Analyst with the World Bank in Washington D.C., USA, leading the pillar on global rapid damage estimation (GRADE) after catastrophes, working directly with country governments. It has facilitated billions of dollars in rapid payouts to governments over the last 8 years through extended use of the methodology produced in his doctoral thesis as a John Monash scholar – such disasters include the Ukraine conflict, Mozambique Floods, Tonga Volcanic eruption, Indonesian earthquake and tsunami, Fiji cyclones and many other similar style disasters. He has built many stochastic risk models for countries and software packages for disasters for various entities including insurers, reinsurers and other companies as well as historic global modelling, exposure, economic models and data products as a consultant and also in his work as a founder and CEO (Analytics) at Risklayer GmbH, a risk modelling company based out of Karlsruhe, Germany. He is also currently at CEDIM (Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology) at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) in Germany as a doctoral advisor and researcher, producing real-time event metrics as well as use of his CATDAT database, a global database of natural disaster socio-economic losses. He holds a doctoral degree (Dr.-Ing) in Engineering from KIT in Germany, a Masters in Earthquake Eng. and Eng. Seismology from UJF Grenoble in France and Univ. Pavia in Italy; an Honours in Civil/Structural Engineering and a BSc (Geology/Geophysics) from University of Adelaide in Australia.
