John Fargo Lathrop, Ph.D., has been an independent consultant in risk analysis and decision analysis since 1985.
While continuing that practice, he has recently joined the Systems and Decision Sciences Section of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Decision Analyst.
Before 1985 he was head of the Decision Analysis Group at Woodward Clyde Consultants.
He has 27 years experience in decision analysis and strategy selection, specializing in:
- strategy generation and selection with uncertainty, multiple goals
- accounting for adversary/competitor actions and reactions
- risk management
- crisis management with networks of decision makers
- supporting management decisions with custom indices that account for multiple conflicting objectives, impacts and risks, using value tradeoffs and other judgments elicited from panels of executives and experts.
Dr. Lathrop’s clients have included 13 corporations, 6 utilities, 17 government agencies, two national laboratories and The IEEE. He is currently on a national panel to address a difficult public policy problem: compensation of veterans for exposure to radiation during atomic bomb tests. He co-developed a graduate course in decision analysis at the University of Michigan with Kan Chen. He was Decision Analysis Cluster Chair, organizing all 14 DA sessions at a recent meeting of INFORMS, the national professional meeting. He has been: on a science advisory panel for the state of California; a proposal evaluator for the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research Program; and a referee for Interfaces and the Journal of Risk Analysis.
Dr. Lathrop’s publications include editing/co-editing two books, authoring/co-authoring 10 book chapters, 11 journal articles, and over 25 technical reports and proceedings papers. He was a Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Vienna, Austria; and a Fellow at the Institute for Environmental Quality, The University of Michigan. He has a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College and a dual Ph.D. in economics and experimental psychology from The University of Michigan.