Karen Clark & Company President and CEO to Deliver Stanford University’s Shah Family Distinguished Lecture

Boston, MA – May 4, 2009

Karen Clark & Company, independent experts in catastrophe risk, catastrophe models, and catastrophe risk management, today announced that President and CEO Karen Clark has been selected to deliver Stanford University’s Shah Family Distinguished Lecture on Thursday, May 14, 2009. The event, sponsored by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, will take place at 4:45 p.m. in Room 105 at Building 320 (Geology Corner), Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

In her lecture, Building and Using Complex Models to Make Financial Decisions, Ms. Clark will address the state of the financial services industry in the context of models used to assess and manage catastrophe risk. Common modeling malpractices will be discussed along with best practices and future research in this area.

“Complex decision-making models have become ubiquitous in many industries, particularly financial services,” said Ms. Clark. “While a model can provide a consistent decision-making framework and expert quantification of key system variables, model precision can be confused with accuracy. I am honored to participate in the Shah Family Fund Lecture Series, and discuss how catastrophe risk management issues relate to the current economic situation.”

The Shah Family Fund was established in 1995 to provide annual fellowships for students in civil engineering, an annual prize for an outstanding staff member in the School of Engineering, and an annual distinguished lecture on catastrophic risk management and related areas. Haresh Shah is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. He is the founding member of the board of directors of Risk Management Solutions Inc., and a leading expert on probability and reliability theory.

For more information on the 2009 Shah Family Distinguished Lecture, please visit http://blume.stanford.edu/Blume/2009ShahFamilyLecture.html.