Ron Dembo

Ron Dembo

Dr. Ron S. Dembo is a leading authority in risk management, financial engineering, and climate risk assessment. A distinguished academic, entrepreneur, and consultant, he has advised some of the world’s largest corporations, banks, and financial institutions. With an extensive career spanning mathematical optimization, computational finance, artificial intelligence, and environmental sustainability, Dr. Dembo has founded groundbreaking companies, pioneered innovative risk models, developed renowned computational algorithms and shaped global finance and sustainability policies.

He began his academic career at Yale University from 1976 to 1986 as an assistant and then associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Management. He also served as a visiting professor at MIT. During this time, he published numerous peer-reviewed papers on finance, computational algorithms, mathematical optimization, and risk modeling. He holds multiple patents in computational finance, climate risk, and software engineering. His research laid the foundation for modern quantitative enterprise risk management. Additionally, his seminal contributions to numerical computation, including inexact Newton methods and truncated Newton methods, are widely cited in the literature on algorithms for large-scale optimization.

In 1989, Dr. Dembo founded Algorithmics Incorporated, a global leader in risk management software with offices in 15 countries. The company grew to serve over 70% of the world’s top 100 banks and four of the five leading insurers, and was eventually sold to Fitch Ratings in 2005, then to IBM in 2012, and later to SS&C Technologies. Algorithmics revolutionized how financial institutions manage enterprise risk.

In 2005, Dr. Dembo shifted his focus to environmental sustainability by founding Zerofootprint Inc., a cleantech company that provided carbon footprint analysis and offset solutions. The company worked with over 250 major corporations and governments to track and reduce carbon emissions. He also launched the Zerofootprint Foundation, which promoted sustainable development and environmental awareness. In 2018, Zerofootprint merged with CarbonX, a blockchain company developing innovative investment products for carbon reduction.

Dr. Dembo's latest venture, Riskthinking.AI, addresses one of today's most critical challenges: measuring climate-related financial risk. His company has engineered the world’s first climate future digital twin, a massive simulation engine for measuring and managing future climate financial risk under uncertainty worldwide. His clients include the largest insurers, banks, stock exchanges, data and analytics providers, regulators, and asset managers worldwide.His work has earned numerous accolades, including a Lifetime Fellow at the Fields Institute for Mathematics (2007), which honours his contribution to Canadian mathematics. In 2007, he was awarded a Distinguished Alumni Medal from the University of Waterloo for his exemplary leadership in risk management and environmental protection.

Dr. Dembo holds degrees from prestigious institutions in operations research and chemical engineering. He has authored several influential books on risk management and his research continues to shape global risk management and climate finance policies, influencing investors, regulators and policymakers worldwide.