Biographies

Prof. Mathilde Bourrier

Prof. Claudine Burton-Jeangros

Prof. Nathalie Brender

Dr. Loïs Bastide

Hélène Pasquini-Descomps

Selection of publications

Project summary and related publications

Prof. Mathilde Bourrier

Mathilde Bourrier holds a PhD in Sociology from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (1996) and an Habilitation from the University of Technology in Compiègne (2004). She moved to Switzerland in 2006 to become a professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva. She taught previously at the Technology University of Compiègne (1997-2006). She works on the social construction of safety, focusing on the conditions under which organizational reliability can be achieved and sustained. During her years at the University of California at Berkeley (1992-1995), she was associated with the High Reliability Organization’s group founded by prof. Todd La Porte. She has conducted extensive ethnographic studies at nuclear power plants in France and in the US, in public hospitals, looking for example at skills and know-how transmission in Anaesthesiology. 

She published four books with the Presses Universitaires de France, l'Harmattan, Cambridge University Press and more recently with Ashgate. Her work has appeared in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, European Management Journal, Revue Française de Sociologie, Revue Socio-Anthropologie.

In the past, she has acted as external expert and academic consultant for the French parliamentary Office of Technology Assessment, the OECD-Nuclear Energy Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the French nuclear regulatory agency, and Electricité de France (EDF). 

Prof. Claudine Burton-Jeangros

Phd in Sociology (University of Geneva, Switzerland), MSc in Health Promotion (University of Cardiff, Wales), is associate professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Geneva. Her research interests include: lay and professional interpretations of public health risks; risk communication around infectious diseases; health inequalities with a lifecourse perspective.

 Prof. Nathalie Brender

Nathalie Brenderis a risk management specialist and a financial reporting expert. She completed a PhD thesis in the field of global risk governance in health, combining science-based and business approaches to risk. In particular, she addressed cost analysis issues and their impact on the formation of international responses to SARS and avian influenza H5N1. Her research interests focus on risk governance, strategic risk management and auditing. Since 2010, she is professor in risk management, corporate finance and accounting at the Haute école de gestion de Genève, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland.

Her past professional experience includes management positions in risk consulting and financial auditing that both involved cost and impact analysis. In 1999, she also became a US Certified Public Accountant.

In this project, Nathalie will analyze the relationship between the risk assessment process and the costs of mitigation measures in the H1N1 pandemic. She will focus on the composition of costs and their valuation in collaboration with Hélène Pasquini-Descomps and David Maradan who will specifically take care of the cost-effectiveness analysis.

Dr. Loïs Bastide

Loïs Bastide holds a Phd in sociology from the Ecole Normal Supérieure in Lyon. He moved to the University of Geneva in 2013, where he is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of Sociology. He is also associate member of the Laboratoire International Associé (LIA) CNRS-ENS Lyon/Chinese Academy of Social Sciences "Post Western Sociologies in France and China".

Between 2005 and 2009, he worked on issues of transnational labor migrations in Southeast Asia, involving extensive fieldwork in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. From 2008 to 2009, he was part of the international research project “International Trading Hubs in East and Southeast Asia (ITHESA)”, where he was in charge of the Singaporean case. Since 2012, He is involved in a research project on Disasters and the re-creation of society, together with French, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese colleagues.

Loïs Bastide collaborates on the “organizational” and “communication” axis of the project.

Hélène Pasquini-Descomps

Hélène Pasquini-Descomps is a PhD student at the University of Geneva (Ch) and a lecturer at Geneva School of Business Administration, University of Applied Sciences (Ch), where she teaches Market and Corporate Finance. She received her Master’s degree in Telecom Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and has over 10 years professional experience working in Investment Banking and Asset Management in Japan, US and Switzerland. Her main research interests are finance, sustainability and cost-effectiveness, with a special interest on corporate and public policies, statistics and simulation modeling.

Dr. David Maradan

David Maradan is an economist, with an emphasis on the valuation of intangible (or non-market) goods and services. He is President of Ecosys SA, a private company specialized in applied economics and led numerous cost-benefit analysis on public policy for governements, international organisations and private firms. He is also lecturer in environmental economics as well as public finance in the Geneva School of Business Administration and the University of Fribourg and Geneva. He teaches microeconomics, environmental economics as well as public finance.

David Maradan obtained his Ph.D. in economics in 2005. He also graduated from the Institute of international Studies in 1998 and earned a postgraduate diploma in public policies analyses in 2001 from the University of Geneva.

He will more specifically take care of the third part of the project, dealing with the valuation of the potential macroeconomic costs of H1N1 as well as of the costs and benefits of mitigation responses.