All of us will face risk in our lifetimes, but not many of us will define the parameters of that risk, and even fewer of us will use those parameters to turn that risk into an advantage.
Consider the risks Americans have experienced as of late: A stock market crash. Wildfires. Mass shootings. Government turmoil. Hurricanes. Fuel shortages. A pandemic.
Maybe risk is easier when you have navigated it from the get-go.
David Ingram ’73 graduated from Lehigh at a time rife with political and economic upheaval. During his senior year, he and his brothers from Sigma Nu went to Washington, D.C., to watch part of the Senate hearings on Watergate. Inflation was high, jobs were scarce, and social order was in the midst of major shifts.
Ingram didn’t anticipate landing a job during that recession. As a math major who didn’t want to become a teacher, Ingram didn’t have many options but found work as a computer operator in a role that didn’t even require a college degree; at least it paid the bills.
Soon he was studying for his actuarial exams, a series of 10 tests that most people require 7-10 years to pass. Despite his smarts, Ingram understood the risks: “I wasn’t the best studier,” he says.
He did pass them all in 11 years and built careers at notable organizations including Provident Mutual, Standard and Poor’s, and Milliman.
By that point, Ingram was using his journalistic skills from his days at The Brown and White.
“My junior year, I became a cub reporter and learned to write to a deadline,” he says. Even then he understood risk. “I knew if poorly written, my stories would be thrown out or rewritten by the editors and run without a byline,” he says.
As an actuary, he wrote about risk — not surprising since he is a chartered enterprise risk analyst, a financial risk manager, and a professional risk manager.
Less surprising: He was doing it with a broader lens, thanks to his Lehigh mindset.
“Many in my industry saw risk as a point on a single axis,” he says. “But a researcher in the field of social anthropology suggested a classification scheme with different approaches to risk that could be adapted to our industry and more accurately take into account human response to risk.”
Ingram’s work across disciplines opened a door as he began a 15-year collaboration with that social anthropologist and wrote essays, presented at conferences, and hosted a webcast.
Ingram applied his risk thinking in a specific area of interest: disease. During the 1980s as AIDS became rampant, Ingram began to study it using both actuarial and epidemiological models. He repeated that work when SARS first presented.
When COVID-19 had gained steam by March 2020, he hosted a webcast about the risks that the pandemic might have on insurance. That topic increased his registrations by 1000% as 2,000 people signed up and tuned in.
As COVID-19 hung around, it presented an opportunity for him to study his models.
“I began tracking the infection rates immediately. Each month the results were different, so I knew we should better understand why,” he says.
While governments and health organizations began telling the general public what to do, no one was studying what people were doing to mitigate their exposure risks.
This is when Ingram recruited his son, Dan Ingram ’09, who was slated to graduate with his MBA from Georgetown and start a new job … but the job was on hold because of the pandemic.
“While the combination of math, statistics, and psychology was exciting, the real spark for me was getting to see my dad in action,” says Ingram ’09. “We could nerd out together and watch my mom roll her eyes with our jokes, plans, and conversations.”
The father-and-son duo surveyed people every week across multiple states by asking them the same questions to determine their adherence choices.
“We asked the respondents how well the people in their community were following 21 common mitigation practices,” says Ingram. They then looked at state and federal infection rates to see if what people said matched what was actually happening with transmission. Over eight months they collected nearly 11,000 observations.
Ingram ’09 created the analytical frameworks and weekly and monthly reports. The duo formed an advisory council that included Tom McAndrew, assistant professor, community and population health, who works in biostatistics in order to forecast infectious diseases.
“It was exciting,” says McAndrew. “Dave and Dan were building accurate, crowdsourced representative samples from across the U.S. that used human judgment and computational models.”
The Society of Actuaries, for which Ingram was a board member, helped fund some of the research and published the first paper generated from the data.
Sadly, the results were not the most encouraging.
“Infection levels and rates remained cyclical,” says Ingram ’09.
“Only when infection rates increased did people take precautions,” says Ingram. “By that point though, it was too late and levels continued to rise.”
For example, on certain college campuses infection rates would go up, and only then did remote classes supersede in-person classes. But the opportunity to prevent the spread of illness had already passed.
“The data we collected might help the next time a pandemic happens, but people made the same damn mistakes others made 100 years ago with the influenza,” says Ingram.
The data is valuable though. McAndrew has since analyzed the data and published another paper. A senior is using the data for a capstone project this semester.
“Crowdsourcing can help make better predictions,” he says. “Often researchers seek to work with a select set of peers rather than rely on the strength of community input. This project has shown me that I should be less hesitant to integrate crowdsourcing into my projects.”
Using the general public in order to garner reliable and consistent data points can be risky. But Ingram understands risk and how to mitigate it.
“We should help people develop better risk intelligence,” he says. “We need the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience in matters involving risk and uncertainty.”
Sounds like the standard approach to a Lehigh-educated student.