OUR KETTLE™ - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- President - Kettle Limited
Amit has over twenty years of reinsurance experience, both in London and Bermuda, having more recently joined from Ariel Re where he led the Specialty Business unit. Prior to Ariel Re, Amit was heading up the Structured/Alternative risk unit specializing in bespoke multi class reinsurance. Amit joined Argo Group in 2009 as part of the Group Ceded Re team. Amit has held various underwriting and broking roles at Guy Carpenter and Swiss Re prior to joining Argo Group. Amit started his career at KPMG in London and is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (UK).
Andrew is an experienced executive with over a decade working in the insurtech and reinsurance space. Most recently he help found and led Argo Group's Digital Division as VP of Digital. Before that, he was Commercial Field Sales Leader for Allstate and has had experience from ground level retail agencies, all the way up through complex mortgage derivative reinsurance pricing/structures. Spending his time between Bermuda and New York, Andrew is passionate about utilizing ground breaking machine learning to solve some of the most complex issues facing the Re/insurance world today.
Barbara's nearly four decades in the Insurance and Reinsurance industry has spanned executive leadership roles on a global platform encompassing InsurTech, Operational & Strategic responsibilities including business and product development, while fostering a culture of innovation, mentorship, sponsorship and recruiting and leading top millennial talent.
Job Titles:
- Founder and Managing Director of Gemini Insurance Consulting Services
- Insurance Legal Counsel
Barbara L. Sutherland is currently the Founder and Managing Director of Gemini Insurance Consulting Services, LLC, which provides legal, claims and regulatory compliance professional services to various clients within the property casualty insurance industry. Barbara joined Argo Group U.S. as senior vice president and chief claim officer in April 2008 and in September 2008 was appointed as senior vice president and general counsel. Ms. Sutherland's extensive range of legal, regulatory and claims experience has included six years with The PMA Insurance Group as its senior vice president, secretary and general counsel. She also has held legal and management positions of increasing responsibility with The Northland Insurance Companies, where she served as vice president, and secretary and general counsel for more than 18 years. Ms. Sutherland is a graduate of Purdue University and received her law degree from Valparaiso University School of Law in Illinois. She is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts of Illinois, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. During her career she has earned the Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter (CPCU), the Associate in Fidelity and Surety Bonding (AFSB), the Associate in Surplus Lines Insurance (ASLI) and the Senior Claims Law Associate (SCLA) designations. She has participated in a number of legal, claims and regulatory insurance industry associations, including serving as a member of the boards of directors for the Minnesota Guaranty Fund, the Pennsylvania Guaranty Fund, the Minnesota Joint Underwriting Association, Federation of Regulatory Counsel, the Council for Litigation Management and the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation. Barbara has also been named by Reactions as one of the Top Women in Insurance.
Before joining Kettle, Blake worked at Allstate and American Family Insurance as a data engineer. He holds a PhD and M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee Knoxville where he studied parallel and high performance computing. He also holds a B.A. from Wartburg College in Computer Science and Engineering Science. When he is not working, he enjoys spending time with his family, playing and listening to music, and studying Meteorology.
Job Titles:
- Chief Underwriting Officer
Brian has spent over 15 years in the reinsurance industry focused on understanding and managing catastrophic risks. Prior to joining Kettle, Brian was the Head of North American Reinsurance at Fidelis where he led a global team specializing in bespoke client solutions. Brian previously held various underwriting and analytical roles within the Tokio Marine Group, including Tokio Millennium Re in Bermuda.
Formerly of RT Specialty, Chris worked as a wholesale property broker collaborating with producers to grow and manage their books specializing in habitational, manufacturing, builder's risk, and wildfire accounts. Before entering the insurance industry, Chris excelled as a professional polo player, providing instruction to clients and training young horses. He holds a B.S in Equine Science and Business from Colorado State University.
Collin graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Economics and an M.S. in Finance and joined Kettle as a business analyst right after graduation. Before Kettle, he worked at Draper Associates as a venture capital intern, where he helped conduct due diligence on potential investment opportunities and witnessed firsthand how technology was being leveraged to tackle some of the world's biggest problems. Outside of work, Collin is a basketball enthusiast and an avid Lakers fan.
Greg was previously an investor at Tarsadia Investments where he worked alongside portfolio companies on special projects. Before joining Tarsadia, he worked as an associate at PJT Partners where he helped to structure and execute several complex liability management transactions in a range of industries and geographies. Greg studied public policy at Brown University and has also received a J.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Greg is an avid skier, golfer, and coffee enthusiast.
Kevin has over twenty years of experience in the reinsurance, insurance and investment industries. Most recently, he was SVP Finance and Chief Investment Officer of James River Group Holdings, Ltd, a publicly traded insurance and reinsurance group. Before that Kevin held the position of CFO or COO for various Bermuda (re)insurance entities owned by James River, Tokio Marine and Argo Group. He also worked as an Investment Analyst for multi strategy hedge fund Tewksbury Capital Management (formerly Trout Trading Management Company) and began his career as an auditor with KPMG in Halifax, Canada. Kevin is a member of Chartered Professional Accountants Canada and the CFA Institute.
Matt is a software engineer and data visualizer. He's helped make the web for more than a decade, working on problems in fintech, retail and fashion strategy, and brand design. Most recently he was an engineering leader and contributor helping bring new products to market at SurveyMonkey.
Matthew is an experienced executive and business builder at the intersection of advanced analytics, data, finance, and technology. Until recently, he oversaw multiple businesses, including many of the firm's innovation initiatives, at Point72, a $20 billion asset manager founded by Steven Cohen. Among these responsibilities, he directed the firm's central portfolio, which collects stock ideas from a broad array of sources, including portfolio managers and analysts, and algorithmically monetizes them. He also oversaw the firm's efforts to develop unique information assets for its portfolio managers, including alternative data. Additionally, Matthew built Point72 Ventures, the firm's venture capital unit, which funds early-stage companies in financial technology, enterprise automation, artificial intelligence, cyber-security, and healthcare. During his four-year tenure, the firm invested in 60 companies. Matthew has served on many private company boards of directors, including currently the boards of Tempo Automation, Imperative Execution, and Domino Data Lab. In 2013, Matthew co-founded Domino Data Lab, a data science platform that businesses use to accelerate research, increase collaboration, and deliver models. It is used by 20% of the Fortune 100. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, among others. Before Domino, Matthew was Co-Head of Research at Bridgewater Associates, a systematic macro hedge fund, where he built and led teams that developed insights on the global economy, created new algorithmic systems for capturing alpha, and published Bridgewater's market commentary, Daily Observations.
Job Titles:
- Principal Software Engineer, Quantitative Analysis
Before joining Kettle, Max previously worked in the option market making industry, in both a quantitative research and development role, and also worked as a post doctoral fellow for a year in a nuclear sciences research lab. He has a background in physics and engineering and holds a master's degree in theoretical physics from McGill University and a PhD in nuclear engineering from Montreal Polytechnique, both in Montreal, Canada, his hometown. He enjoys coming up with novel and elegant solutions that combine mathematics and computer science to solve challenging problems and, on a different note, watching horror movies, Formula 1 and drinking whiskey!
Prior to joining Kettle, Mike was a reinsurance treaty broker most recently with TigerRisk and prior to that with Guy Carpenter. During those years he worked with numerous cedants to help design and procure reinsurance to efficiently transfer risk. Mike graduated from Drake University with a BSBA degree in finance and accounting.
Job Titles:
- Climate Scientist
- Senior Climate Data Scientist
Mojtaba Sadeghi is a Climate Scientist, having earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. During his Ph.D., Mojtaba developed a near-real time and a historical precipitation dataset using deep neural network algorithms. These two datasets are useful for many hydrological applications, such as developing flood early warning systems, and wildfire prediction models. At Kettle, Mojtaba brings his Earth Science and Machine Learning knowledge to better understand, assess and mitigate climate change-induced catastrophes over the United States.
Nathaniel previously led Ushahidi, the world's largest open source data platform for crisis response. Here he helped scale the Ushahidi platform to over 200 countries gathering over 10M first hand reports. Previous to that he was a Presidential Innovation Fellow for Open Data, and then the first Chief Data Officer of the US Agency for International Development, where he helped open up and analyze large data sets for humanitarian response. He has been part of the founding teams of technology startups like BRCK and FellowAI.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Insurance Executive
Nigel is a seasoned insurance executive having spent 30 years in the industry primarily in London and Bermuda. As founder and President of Argo's Bermuda insurance operations he has led the creation of many successful underwriting platforms. Additional roles included EVP of Strategy and Business Development at Argo Group with responsibility for the creation of underwriting platforms in the US, Brasil, Dubai and London amongst other geographies. He also led the digitisation campaign as the company sought to capitalise on the benefits of data science and enhanced technology and digital innovation. Prior to Argo he held senior underwriting management roles at AXAXL, Zurich group and Chubb.
Job Titles:
- Environmental Scientist
- Head of Technical Product
Noam Rosenthal is an environmental scientist, having earned his B.S. in Environmental Engineering and M.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University. Previously Noam worked as an analyst for Premise Data and held fellowships in risk finance at Stanford's Steyer-Taylor Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Noam supports Kettle's risk modelling and underwriting. He is currently completing doctoral research at UCLA focused on wildfire risk in Southern California.
Mrs. Meyerhoff-Kennedy has over 15 years of experience in the industry, most recently holding the position of VP, Head of E&S Property at Hanover Insurance. Prior to joining Hanover, Sarah had Assistant VP roles in brokerage and underwriting at RT Specialty and AmWINS. Sarah brings leadership experience both at a significant carrier and with some of the top wholesalers in the business.
Job Titles:
- ML Engineer
- Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning
Sasha is an ML engineer, who is passionate about designing, researching and building ML systems that are used for climate modeling. Sasha got her Master's degree in Mathematics from Belarusian State University, and Master's degree in Computer Science & Machine Learning from Western Washington University. Before joining Kettle, she worked as a Software Engineer in her hometown Minsk, researched and built deep learning models in the US Department of Energy national lab, helped to build a climate risk management platform in one of the leading risk management companies. In her free time she loves reading, running, surfing and cooking.
Prior to joining Kettle, Taimur was a property reinsurance underwriter for AmericanAg, managing an international and domestic book of treaty business. He holds the CPCU, ARe, and AINS designations. Before entering reinsurance, Taimur worked in sales and product development for Plaskolite, North America's largest manufacturer of thermoplastic sheet. Taimur graduated from The Ohio State University with a B.S. degree in agribusiness and applied economics.
Job Titles:
- Principal Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer
- Scientist in Earth Science
Yaling is a passionate scientist in Earth Science and Artificial Intelligence. She has gained her Ph.D in Earth Science from Purdue University and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been working on Computational Earth System Modeling and Human-Earth Interactions for 10 years. Before joining Kettle, Yaling was a Research Scientist at Columbia University and applied Machine Learning in extreme climate events such as droughts and floods to improve the understanding of the impacts of climate change and human activities on the Earth System. At Kettle she brings her expertise in Earth Science and Machine Learning to better predict and assess climate change induced catastrophes.
Job Titles:
- Staff Software Engineer, Quantitative Analysis