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Jan Feys

Chief Scientific Officer – Chelsea Avondale

Jan Feys

Jan Feys is the Chief Scientific Officer at Chelsea Avondale.

Jan leads the team of scientists and engineers responsible for the development and delivery of scientific pricing models for the Group. This comprises both catastrophe physics models and non-catastrophe machine learning models. More recently, Jan has also coordinated the engineering surrounding the policy administration system which introduces substantially higher levels of processing efficiency and automation than traditional solutions.

Prior to joining Chelsea Avondale in 2018, Jan completed his PhD in Applied Mathematics at McGill University and his postdoctoral research at McMaster University in conjunction with the prestigious Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto. His abilities to transpose mathematical concepts into the realms of physics and computer engineering have ensured a clear direction for the science and engineering of the Group, providing a level of granularity in risk evaluation rarely dreamt of in today’s insurance industry.

During his PhD, Jan worked on a multitude of projects that used computational fluid dynamics to simulate the physical properties and effects of movements in liquid & gas particles. His dissertation focused on a theoretical and computational study of the vortex that is created behind the wingtip of an aircraft at a high angle of attack. These vortices create instability in the air and are impacted heavily by meteorological conditions, causing the need for variations in the gaps provided between takeoffs. Jan’s research included the development of a bespoke 3D Navier-Stokes model to allow for interactions between multiple modes of instability, and showed that these vortices likely dissipate much faster than originally conceived by other research in the field. These conclusions have attracted significant interest from major government councils, airports and aircraft manufacturers.

In his postdoctoral research, Jan worked on the development of a global climate model that provided an adaptive simulation of ocean currents and atmospheric flows – primarily for use on earth but with applicability to other planets. The model improved on the speed and parallel efficiency of previous research in the field through the application of wavelets in the underlying mathematics of the model, which allowed for better control of the relative error in the horizontal coordinate than a classical numerical scheme. It also showed practical application in the modelling of tsunami events, such as the 2013 Indonesian tsunami across the Indian Ocean.

Jan also has substantial experience in epidemic modelling and natural language processing. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

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