About Us
The Coleman Fung Risk Management Research Center at UC Berkeley supports research on quantitative methods to measure and control risk in financial and commodities markets, and the extension of these quantitative methods to other contexts.
The Fung Center was created by a very generous donation from Coleman Fung, founder and Executive Chairman of Open Link Financial, Inc. It is housed administratively within the Institute of Business and Economic Research (IBER), and physically within the Department of Economics. The Director is Robert M. Anderson, Coleman Fung Professor of Risk Management and Professor of Economics and of Mathematics.
The term “risk management” means different things to scholars in different disciplines. Within economics, finance and operations research, the essential element of risk is uncertainty. In these disciplines, risk management focuses on quantitative analysis of the set of possible outcomes, the probability distribution over the set of outcomes, and the impact of various risk mitigation strategies on that probability distribution.
The Center takes a broad view of risk management, not limited to financial risk. Environmental and energy risks are a particular interest. The Center will consider proposals to adapt the quantitative methods that have been developed for the analysis of financial risk and apply them to the analysis of risk in other contexts.
The Center supports research in risk management by providing research grants to UC Berkeley faculty. Proposals to the Center should emphasize the quantitative analytical methods to be used in measuring and mitigating risk.