Prof. Despoina Makariou

Despoina Makariou is Assistant Professor of Risk Management and Insurance at the University of St. Gallen and a Visiting Research Fellow in Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She holds a PhD in Statistics at LSE, where her research focused on the development and application of statistical learning methods in insurance and finance. Prof. Makariou has been granted scholarships for academic excellence and research potential and has industry experience in the London Insurance Market in the areas of catastrophe risk modelling, and pricing of (re)insurance and alternative risk transfer products. 

Professor Makariou’s research examines how organisations make decisions under uncertainty in insurance and financial markets. She focuses on settings where risks are rare but severe, exposures evolve over time, and available information is limited. In these environments, firms must price risk, allocate capital, and design governance structures while relying on imperfect quantitative models. Her work combines advanced statistical methods with machine learning techniques, with close attention to institutional and market contexts.

Her research spans three interconnected areas. First, she studies catastrophe risk and insurance-linked markets, analysing how extreme risks are modelled, priced, and traded across insurance-linked securities and related asset classes, and how modelling practices shape pricing and capital allocation under tail risk. Second, she examines structural change in evolving risk environments, with a particular focus on climate-related risks and broader developments in sustainable finance. Third, she investigates how organisations interpret and use risk signals in practice, linking quantitative modelling to questions of transparency and risk governance.

• Portfolio Management and Asset Classes
  • Asset Pricing
  • Options and Other Derivatives
• Financial Institutions
  • Insurance Companies
• Frontier Topics
  • Machine Learning and Applications of AI
  • Sustainable Finance