Craig W. Tillman
President
WeatherPredict Consulting Inc. (An Affiliate of RenaissanceRe Holdings)
Mr. Tillman serves as President of WeatherPredict Consulting Inc., a RenaissanceRe affiliate that provides intelligence on atmospheric perils to a range of entities. Craig Tillman has been associated with the RenaissanceRe organization since 1996. As part of the team that formed Glencoe Insurance Ltd., Mr. Tillman served as that company’s Chief Underwriting Officer. He has also led RenaissanceRe’s modeling group, focusing on catastrophe models and developing analytical staff to support underwriting operations.
Prior to joining RenaissanceRe, Mr. Tillman’s experience spanned 13 years as a consultant in catastrophe risk for clients in the insurance, government, equity management, and municipal bond insurance industries. Mr. Tillman has also played a key role in developing software tools and risk analysis methods for use in analyzing a wide range of commercial and residential exposures. Mr. Tillman is a member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and also serves as an Executive Director for the Institute for Business and Home Safety.
Joel Sivillo
Manager of Business Development
Joel Sivillo is responsible for much of WeatherPredict’s external and internal client service communications, as well as exploration of new markets for WPC services. Since joining WeatherPredict’s group of scientists in 2001, Joel has helped to organize WPC’s forecasting and scientific knowledge in order to provide valuable weather intelligence to those in the Agricultural, Insurance, and Energy sectors.
Joel is a meteorologist with over 10 years of expertise in the integration, testing and support of operational weather systems, having formerly worked with Litton/PRC as the lead meteorologist of the National Weather Service AWIPS Network Control Facility. He holds an MS in Meteorology from Florida State University and a BS in Physics from Allegheny College.
Dr. David Bachiochi Ph.D.
Regional Manager, Raleigh Office
Dr. Bachiochi is responsible for helping lead a team of WPC scientists in various operational forecast/product development and risk assessment projects driven by client needs. Dr Bachiochi has been part of WeatherPredict since its inception in 2000 and has played a pivotal role in overall R&D efforts during that time and has recently helped manage company operations in the Raleigh office. Dr Bachiochi contributes with his expertise in prediction and risk assessment for seasonal climate and ENSO, agricultural and energy interests, extra-tropical storms, tropical storms and to a lesser extent climate change.
Dr. Bachiochi has over 15 years of experience as an atmospheric scientist both academically and with WeatherPredict. His focused research academically revolved around non-linear dynamics of the atmosphere, ENSO dynamics, coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling, and forecast ensemble techniques with some minor emphasis on climate data assimilation and global climate model cloud modeling. His work prior to joining WeatherPredict included pioneering work in coupled model initialization and seasonal climate SuperEnsemble forecasting. In recent he has been involved Dr Bachiochi holds his B.S., M.S., and PhD. In Atmospheric Science from Florida State University.
Dr. Sergei Frolov Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
Dr. Frolov is a senior research scientist responsible for leading research, development, and operational support of products and services informing clients about ocean-related environmental hazards. Dr. Frolov started working for WeatherPredict’s predecessor organization as a consultant in 1998 and has assumed a permanent research scientist position in 2001. Dr. Frolov has initiated and led to successful completion multiple research and consulting projects for the offshore oil and gas industry. He is a principal contributor to the Eddy Forecast System – the essential tool used by WeatherPredict to forecast ocean currents in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dr. Frolov has over 10 years experience as an oceanographer and computer modeler including designing computer ocean simulation and prediction systems. Dr. Frolov holds a B.S. in Theoretical Physics from St. Petersburg State University (Russia) and a M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island.
Jason Lin, Ph.D.
Vice President, Engineering Science
WeatherPredict Consulting Inc
Raleigh, North Carolina
Dr. Jason Lin joined WPC as vice president in 2006. Dr. Lin is responsible for envisioning and leading the development of cutting-edge scientific applications and marketable technological products related to risk and its mitigation for the organization. He is a principal initiator and/or contributor for AeroEdge vortex suppression technology, AeroVentTM pressure equalization technology, RenaissanceRe Wall of Wind facility developments and experimental studies, wind vulnerability and mitigation for residential and commercial buildings, and hurricane loss risk modeling, etc.
Dr. Lin has over 25 years of research and development experiences in building aerodynamics, structural dynamics, wind engineering, risk modeling, as well as wind energy and aircraft design. Dr. Lin has developed the concept of aerodynamic tailoring to reduce wind loads for buildings, and has pioneered its reduction to practice for hurricane resistant buildings. Dr. Lin has also developed a wind load estimation expert system for predicting wind damage to buildings, and developed an industry-leading, engineering science-based probabilistic model for estimating hurricane vulnerability for a variety of buildings. He has performed numerous wind tunnel tests of structures including some of the world’s tallest and largest commercial buildings as well as a variety of residential buildings. Dr. Lin is an author or co-author of over 10 refereed journal publications and a number of technical conference papers. He is the inventor for 6 US and international patents or pending patents.
Prior to joining WPC, Dr. Lin was a Principal Scientist with Risk Management Solutions (RMS), Inc., a Senior Specialist with RWDI Group, Inc., a Principal Scientist with Applied Research Associates (ARA), Inc., and a Senior Research Engineer with the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory (BLWTL) of the Alan G. Davenport Wind Engineering Group, and a group leader of Wind Engineering at the Guangdong Building Research Institute. Dr. Lin obtained his doctorate and master’s degrees in engineering science from Nanjing University of Astronautics and Aeronautics, performed postdoctoral research at the Swedish National Institute for Building Research and at BLWTL at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
Dail Rowe, Ph.D.
Regional Manager, Narragansett Office
Dr. Rowe is responsible for leading a team of WeatherPredict scientists focused on hurricane risk assessment and forecasting, and works closely with clients managing their exposure to hurricane risk. Dr. Rowe joined WeatherPredict’s predecessor organization as a senior research scientist in 1999 and has assumed positions of increasing responsibility since that time, including serving as an integral part of WeatherPredict’s atmospheric and oceanic research and development efforts. Dr. Rowe is a principal contributor to many WeatherPredict initiatives including real-time tropical cyclone prediction, simulation of historical tropical cyclone events, assessment of risk from tropical cyclones and extratropical storms, and research into climatological control of tropical cyclone path and intensity.
Dr. Rowe has over 15 years experience as an oceanographer and meteorologist including several years on the research faculty at the University of Hawaii, where his research focused on the air-sea interactions in the western Pacific warm-pool that are essential for understanding the ENSO phenomenon. Dr. Rowe holds a B.S. in Physics from Guilford College and a Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island.
Eric Williford, Ph.D.
Manager, Operational Weather Forecasting Team
Dr. Williford is presently manager of WeatherPredict's operational weather forecasting team, which includes worldwide tropical cyclone prediction. This group is responsible for daily operational weather forecast products, including expert analysis and informational data sets, for both internal and external clientele. He co-founded WeatherPredict's predecessor, Weather Predict Inc., in Tallahassee Florida and has had a key role in the establishment of its operational weather forecasting program. Dr. Williford is a contributor to many WeatherPredict initiatives including real-time tropical cyclone prediction, prediction and assessment of risk from tropical cyclones and extratropical storms, and research into operational weather forecast improvements, including ongoing enhancements to the worldwide precipitation and temperature forecasting and tropical cyclone prediction efforts.
Dr. Williford has 12 years of numerical weather and operational tropical prediction and analysis including the establishment of the Realtime Hurricane Forecast Center in the Meteorology department at Florida State University, under Dr. T. N. Krishnamurti's guidance. From this effort came the Superensemble™ forecasting technology, created and patented through Florida State by Dr. Krishnamurti, and this technology was key to Dr. Williford's research, including his dissertation topic. Dr. Williford holds a B.S. in Engineering (Computer Science and Electrical Engineering majors) and a Masters and Ph. D. in Meteorology from Florida State University. While attending Florida State, he was a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Fellow and is presently a member of the American Meteorological Society.