Dr. James Thomson, Chair

Jim Thomson is the chair of the Board of Praedicat and the President Emeritus of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution that helps improve policy and decisions through research and analysis, which he led as CEO from 1989 to November 2011. With annual revenues of over $250 million and a staff of more than 1600 from more than 50 countries, and a Ph.D. level graduate school, RAND’s research programs address a range of domestic, international, and national security issues. RAND’s core competencies include health care services, supply chains, energy and environment, transportation and infrastructure, education, personnel management, demography, defense and international security.

Dr. Thomson describes his career up to now in four phases. In the first, he was an experimental nuclear physicist and published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. In the second phase, in 1974, he was a U.S. government official dealing with defense and arms control matters. He served in both the Defense Department and at the White House. In the third phase, he focused on policy research covering a range of strategic issues. In the fourth phase, while continuing his research, Dr. Thomson moved into research leadership positions at RAND. He became RAND’s fourth president in 1989. During his tenure RAND grew by 60%, expanded its research agenda, increased its policy impact and become an international organization with offices in nine cities in North America and overseas.

Dr. Thomson is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York; the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London; and the board of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. He is a director of AK Steel Corporation and Object Reservoir.

Dr. Thomson holds a B.S. in physics from the University of New Hampshire (1967) and an M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from Purdue University (1972). He has honorary doctorates from Purdue and Pepperdine Universities and the University of New Hampshire. He has working knowledge of German and Spanish.

Dr. Siddhartha Dalal

Siddhartha Dalal is chief technology officer (CTO) at the RAND Corporation and is responsible for creating and coordinating strategies and architecture for new technology research and platforms; and for developing potential paths to commercialization. Under his leadership, RAND has developed several new systems for conducting research. He played a key role in development of Praedicat’s technology and its spinoff.

Before joining RAND in 2007, Dr. Dalal was vice president of research at Xerox, incharge of Xerox's worldwide imaging and software services research. Dalal has also worked at Bell Laboratories and at Bellcore/SAIC/Telcordia Technologies, where he served as chief scientist and executive director.

Dr. Dalal’s current research focuses on information science, network engineering and data mining. He has published over 90 peer reviewed articles, several monographs and has filed over 10 patents. He received his B.S. from the University of Bombay and his M.B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

Jacques Dubois

Jacques Dubois retired at the end of 2006 from Swiss Re Group where he had served as a Member of Swiss Re’s Executive Board in Zurich, Switzerland and as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Swiss Re America Holding Corporation, the holding company for Swiss Re’s operations in North America. In addition, Dubois held other roles at Swiss Re, including Deputy Head of Swiss Re’s Global Life and Health Reinsurance division, and board member of Swiss Re subsidiaries in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of South Africa and Australia. During his last two years at Swiss Re, he served as Global Head of Corporate Development.

For nearly twenty years starting in 1979, Dubois was one of three partners of Insurance Investment Associates, an investment banking partnership that was focused on the merger and acquisition of insurance companies. In 1988, he and his two partners founded Life Re Corporation for the purpose of acquiring General Reassurance Corporation from General Reinsurance Corporation in a leveraged buyout. Life Re, with Dubois as President, became a public company listed on the NYSE in 1992 and grew by increasing its traditional reinsurance business and by developing a business that became known as Administrative Reinsurance, or Admin Re. He remained a partner at Insurance Investment Associates until 1998 when he joined Swiss Re upon its acquisition of Life Re. He began his career in 1972 when he joined Philo Smith & Company, a securities firm specializing in insurance company stock research and insurance company M&A.

Since retiring, Dubois has served as a consultant to financial institutions on matters including acquisitions, litigations, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. He has also been active as a board member of several charitable organizations.

While at Swiss Re, Dubois served as co-chairman of the Advisory Board of RAND’s Center for Terrorism Risk and Management Policy. He currently is a member of the Advisory Board for RAND’s Center for Global Risk and Security.

Dubois holds an A.B. in mathematics from the College of the Holy Cross (1970) and an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (1972).

Dr. Robert T. Reville, President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Robert T. Reville is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Praedicat. Until recently, Reville was Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. At RAND, he conceived and led the liability catastrophe R&D project that provided the foundation for Praedicat.

From 2002-2008, he was the Director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, a research center dedicated to improving public policy related to liability, compensation and insurance. He was also founder and co-director of the RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management Policy, a policy research center at RAND which published research on terrorism insurance that was influential in congressional debates over the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. He was the director of the RAND Center for Corporate Ethics and Governance. Reville’s final publication from his tenure at RAND was an edited volume Transparency in the U.S. Civil Justice System, published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

Reville has published extensively on occupationally disabled workers. His work on wage losses from permanent partial disability was cited and several recommendations adopted in workers’ compensation reform legislation by the California legislature. He served for two terms on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reville received his Ph.D. in economics from Brown University.

Hemant Shah

Hemant Shah is President and Chief Executive Officer of Risk Management Solutions. Since co-founding RMS in 1989 as a spin-out from Stanford University, Shah helped build RMS from five colleagues working from his apartment to 1,000 professionals providing the world’s leading catastrophe modeling solutions to the global insurance and financial services sector. He is widely recognized within the global risk industry as a proactive and influential leader, including “100 Most Powerful People in the Insurance Industry” (Insurance Newscast, 2011, and 6 years running); “Most Influential Person of the Year” (Reactions Global Awards, 2011); “Top 40 Most Influential” (Global Reinsurance, 2008), one of “35 Rising Stars” (Business Insurance, 2002), and a “Leader of the Future” (Global Reinsurance, 2000).

Shah serves on the Board of Overseers of St. John’s School of Risk Management and Actuarial Science (College of Insurance), is a Director of the RAND Center for the Study of Terrorism Risk Management Policy, a Director on the Board of RAND’s Institute for Civil Justice, and a Director of the Singapore-based Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies. He is also a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, and part of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Tom Unterman

Tom Unterman is the Founding Partner of Rustic Canyon Partners, one of Los Angeles’ leading venture capital firms. Prior to founding Rustic Canyon Partners, he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of The Times Mirror Company. Prior to joining Times Mirror, he was a partner of Morrison & Foerster and, earlier, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

In addition to his Rustic Canyon board service, Unterman serves on the boards of The California Community Foundation, CalArts, Heal the Bay, MOCA (Life Trustee), and ProPublica. He is also a member of the State of California Commission on Access to Justice.