Council Board Member

Position: Founding Council Member, The Global Centre for Risk & Innovation (GCRI)
Type: Strategic scientific and innovation governance council role (non-executive)
Board: Council Members are considered for Board nomination after joining and serving in good standing
Location: International (distributed, hybrid)
Term: 3 Years

Apply here: https://therisk.global/work/job/council-board-member/

Context and Purpose

Today’s global risk science and data infrastructure were not built for compounding climate, systemic, technological, and socio-economic shocks. Models, datasets, and pilots are often:

• Fragmented and inconsistent
• Hard to audit or reproduce
• Not wired into real decision and capital flows

The Global Centre for Risk & Innovation (GCRI) is being established as the Frontier International Risk Science & Innovation Centre. Its purpose is to build and steward the evidence rail for modern risk governance—methods, datasets, models, and tools that can be trusted, audited, and operationalized by governments, markets, and communities. The Founding Council is the primary scientific and strategic leadership community of GCRI. It defines the ambition, standards, and partnerships that will anchor a new era of risk science and innovation. The Board will be drawn from and accountable to this Council. As a Founding Council Member, you will help set the intellectual, ethical, and institutional foundation for GCRI.

Role Purpose

The Founding Council exists to:

• Shape GCRI’s mission, research agenda, and innovation strategy
• Define and uphold standards of scientific and technical excellence
• Anchor a global coalition of leading institutions committed to open, auditable risk science
• Guide what GCRI focuses on and how it works
• Help design the platforms, programs, and norms that will outlast them
• Act as connectors between GCRI and the world’s leading labs, agencies, and data/tech platforms
• Council Members in good standing may later be nominated or elected to the GCRI Board.

Key Responsibilities

As a Founding Council Member of GCRI, you will:

• Contribute to defining GCRI’s mission and long-term vision as the global reference centre for risk science and innovation.
• Help design the initial portfolio of programs and labs—e.g., climate and disaster risk, systemic financial risk, infrastructure resilience, anticipatory action.
• Participate in Council processes that set annual and multi-year priorities, including where and how GCRI will invest effort, partnerships, and resources.
• Help set expectations for methodological rigor, transparency, reproducibility, and uncertainty management in GCRI’s outputs.
• Contribute to the design of validation, benchmarking, and replication frameworks for models, indices, and toolkits.
• Provide guidance on ethical, legal, and social implications, particularly around data use, algorithmic impacts, and equity.
• Advise on strategies for data partnerships, data sharing, and compute infrastructure, respecting sovereignty, privacy, and security.
• Help prioritize and shape the creation of digital public goods for risk—schemas, ontologies, reference datasets, open-source components, and playbooks.
• Ensure GCRI’s work is useful to and usable by regulators, policymakers, financiers, and operators, not only the research community.
• Use your platform to bring leading universities, labs, agencies, platforms, and philanthropic/enterprise R&D programs into structured engagement with GCRI.
• Participate in Council meetings, thematic working groups, and convenings that align cross-disciplinary and cross-regional work.
• Help ensure that GCRI’s ecosystem reflects diverse geographies, disciplines, and lived experiences of risk.
• Join as a paid Founding Council Member, fulfilling the agreed governance contribution / dues and remaining in good standing (financial, participation, and disclosure obligations).
• Actively identify and encourage high-caliber peers and institutions—labs, agencies, platforms, research programs—to join GCRI’s Council or partner network, within data-ethics, competition, and conflict-of-interest constraints.
• Contribute to shaping membership categories, expectations, and recognition mechanisms that reinforce excellence and openness.
• Engage actively and constructively such that you may be considered for Board nomination or election once GCRI’s Board is constituted.
• Help define, as a Council, the criteria and process by which Board members are selected from among Council Members.

Candidate Profile

We are seeking frontier leaders in science, technology, and innovation, typically with 15+ years in one or more of:

• Research leadership – e.g., director/head of a major lab, institute, observatory, or cross-institution program.
• National agencies and observatories – senior roles in meteorological, space, statistical, or risk-observatory agencies.
• Data/AI and complex systems – leadership of data/AI or modelling programs focused on climate, disaster, infrastructure, systemic, or financial risk.
• Multilateral, development, or corporate R&D – senior roles in multilateral institutions, development banks, philanthropic foundations, or corporate R&D programs focused on resilience or future systems.
• Open platforms and public goods – experience building or governing large research programs, open datasets, or open-source platforms adopted by multiple institutions.

Capabilities and Mindset

• Strategic and systems thinker, comfortable linking measurement, models, policy, finance, and operations.
• Institution and platform builder, interested in designing governance, data, ethics, and collaboration frameworks that others will rely on.
• Open-science and public-benefit orientation, balancing transparency and access with real-world constraints.
• Cross-domain convener, able to bring together scientists, engineers, policymakers, financiers, and community voices and move from analysis to design.
• Long-term perspective, seeing GCRI as a multi-decade institution-building effort.

Eligibility, Membership, and Independence

• Holds a full-time primary role outside Council.
• Can commit sustained Council-level time.
• Commits to join as a paid Founding Council Member and to remain in good standing (dues, engagement, disclosures).
• Meets integrity, independence, and professional standards consistent with the GCRI Charter and Bylaws.
• Willing to fully disclose relevant interests and abide by conflict-of-interest, data-ethics, and recusal policies.
• Not placed in a situation where Council service creates unmanageable conflicts.