About the Event
Auroop Ganguly, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, shared his personal journey building climate resilience. Professor Ganguly co-founded the Boston-based climate analytics startup risQ, which models the complex financial risks posed by climate change, translating them to actionable insights for municipal debt stakeholders. The startup was spun out of Ganguly's Sustainability and Data Sciences Lab, and over its lifetime received $1.65 million in National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant funding. The firm was just acquired by a large financial company.
In an article titled “The startups predicting climate risk for investors” the Wall Street Journal explained that “high-tech newcomers [i.e. RisQ] use satellite imaging, public databases and algorithms, to map out threats of natural disasters for specific towns—and even buildings—that back bonds.” The RisQ venture was also the topic of a story in Northeastern News in January 2022.
About Auroop Ganguly
Auroop Ganguly is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, where he has affiliate appointments with the Khoury College of Computer Science and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. His research intersects weather and hydrologic extremes under climate change, lifeline infrastructures resilience under compound extremes, as well as machine learning and nonlinear physics. He has a joint role as a Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Ganguly co-founded the Boston-based climate analytics startup risQ.
Prior to Northeastern, Ganguly worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a research institute of the US Department of Energy, and at Oracle Corporation, along with a best-of-breed called Demantra Inc. which was subsequently acquired by Oracle. He has been in review panels of the United Nations (UN) Environmental Programme and other US and global agencies, his work has been cited by the UN and US intergovernmental and national reports, and he has delivered invited/keynote talks at workshops organized by the US National Academies and NSF. Ganguly is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as well as a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and obtained a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
About the Nardone Family Seminar Series
Made possible by a gift from David R. Nardone, this seminar series brings scholars and practitioners to Northeastern University to share insights on emerging markets.