Detlof von Winterfeldt

Biography

Detlof von Winterfeldt is the inaugural J.A. Tiberti Chair of Ethics and Decision Making and a Professor of Systems Engineering at the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California. He holds a joint appointment as Professor of Public Policy at the Price School of Public Policy at USC. In 2004 he co-founded the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE), the first university-based center of excellence funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. He served as CREATE’s director from 2004 to 2008 and he was reappointed to this position in 2015. In the interim, he was on leave of absence from USC as Director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (2009-2012) and as Centennial Professor of the London School of Economics and Political Science (2008-2012).

Throughout his academic career he has been active in teaching, research, university administration, and consulting. He has taught courses in statistics, decision analysis, risk analysis, systems analysis, research design, and behavioral decision research. His research interests are in the foundation and practice of decision and risk analysis applied to the areas of technology development, environmental risks, natural hazards and terrorism.

He is the co-author of two books, three edited volumes, and author or co-author of over 120 refereed articles and chapter. He has served on fifteen committees of U.S. National Academies, including an appointment to the National Academies’ Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications and as Chair of the Committee on the Study of Performance Based Safety Regulations. He is an elected Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and of the Society for Risk Analysis. 

In 2000 he received the Ramsey Medal for distinguished contributions to decision analysis from the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. In 2009 he received the Gold Medal from the International Society for Multicriteria Decision Making for advancing the field. In 2011 The Council of IIASA elected him as Honorary IIASA Scholar and in 2012 he received the distinguished achievement award by the Society for Risk Analysis.

Selected Publications

• Ferretti, V., Montibeller, G., & von Winterfeldt, D. (2022). Testing the Effectiveness of Debiasing Techniques to Reduce Overprecision in the Elicitation of Subjective Continuous Probability Distributions. European Journal of Operational Research, 304(2), 661-675.
• Thrift, S. & von Winterfeldt, D. (2021). Risk Informed Benefit-Cost Analysis for Homeland Security R&D: Methodology and an Application to Evaluating the Advanced Personal Protection System for Wildland Firefighters. Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, 12(2):335-366.
• von Winterfeldt, D., Farrow, S., John, R., Eyer, J., Rose, A., & Rosoff, H. (2020). Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Homeland Security Research: A Risk-Informed Methodology with Applications to the U.S. Coast Guard. Risk Analysis, 40(3), 450-475.