Vicki Bier
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vicki Marion Bier is an American systems engineer and decision analyst whose work concerns risk management, disaster preparedness, and critical infrastructure protection, including analysis of the safety of nuclear power, anti-terrorism, and preparedness for sea level rise caused by global warming.[1][2][3] She is professor emerita of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an external fellow in the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events at the University of Southern California,[4] and editor-in-chief of the journal Decision Analysis.[5]
Bier was born in New York City to two "risk-averse parents", and grew up in Tucson, Arizona.[2] After undergraduate study in mathematical sciences at Stanford University, graduating in 1976,[2][6] she did her doctoral studies with Alvin Drake at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With the help of Liz Drake, she worked as a graduate student doing risk analysis for the Arthur D. Little firm.[2] Her 1983 dissertation was A Measure of Uncertainty Importance for Components in Fault Trees.[7]
She worked in industry on nuclear power plant safety from 1982 until 1989, and joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1989.[6]
