UCL INSTITUTE FOR RISK & DISASTER REDUCTION

Joanna Faure Walker is a Lecturer in Risk and Disaster Reduction at the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. She joined the IRDR in May 2012. After completing a PhD on “Mechanics of continental extension from Quaternary strain fields in the Italian Apennines” in 2009, Joanna worked for RMS for 2 years, where she became familiar with catastrophe models and how academic research is used by the insurance industry. Since returning to academia, she has begun teaching on and developing the IRDR post-graduate programs. In her research, she is integrating her knowledge gained from the city and her research interests in seismic hazard and continental extension.

• Dr Joanna Faure Walker, IRDR staff profile webpage
  

Robert Muir-Wood is the Chief Research Officer of Risk Management Solutions. He co-founded the London office of RMS in 1996. He has degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences both from Cambridge University. He is the author of many scientific papers on the analysis of earthquakes, hurricanes and windstorms, more than 150 articles and six books. He has more than 20 years experience in developing probabilistic catastrophe models, and has led projects to build models for earthquake, tropical cyclone, windstorm and flood, in Europe, Japan, North America, Caribbean and Australia and has been the technical lead on a number of Catastrophe risk securitization transactions. He has also lectured widely on catastrophe risk and the business response to climate change. He was Lead Author on Insurance, Finance and Climate Change for the 2007 4th IPCC Assessment Report and is Vice Chair of the OECD High Level Advisory Board of the International Network on the Financial Management of Large Scale Catastrophes.

A former senior police officer with the Metropolitan Police, Tony Moore moved into academia, eventually becoming Associate Director of the Resilience Centre at Cranfield University based within the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.   He retired from that post in April 2009.   He is currently the Deputy President of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management and Temporary Editor of its Journal, Alert.

During his academic career, he taught on a number of Master's degree programmes and ran crisis/disaster/emergency management courses in Africa, Asia, the Middle-East, Central and Eastern Europe.   He specialises in leadership and decision-making in stressful situations.   He has spoken at a number of national and international conferences on emergency management and related issues.  

He was the co-editor for the 3 editions of Tolley's Handbook of Disaster and Emergency Management, published in 2002, 2004 and 2006, and is the author of Disaster and Emergency Management Systems, published by the British Standards Institution in November 2008.

Kate is currently the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Advisor at Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). She is an applied interdisciplinary Geoscientist specialising in the impacts of natural hazards on society and has been involved in projects that aim to reduce risk in hazard settings by using practical interdisciplinary DRR methods. Previously Kate completed a PhD at the University of Plymouth examining cultural vulnerability and resilience in Indonesia and went on to be a post-doctoral research associate at Oxford University working with UK local authorities on flood science knowledge exchange. Her role at CAFOD focuses on providing technical support for DRR and climate change adaptation mainstreaming and programming across the organisation. She is also currently co-chair of the BOND DRR working group.

Peter Sammonds is the Director of the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and is a Professor of Geophysics in the UCL Department of Earth Sciences. He is also the Strategic Advisor for the NERC Increasing Resilience to Natural Hazards Programme. He has also made substantial media appearances (over 40 since 2004) on prestigious national and international news, current affairs and science programmes, including BBC News at 10, BBC Newsnight, ITN, US PSB and CNN, promoting public understanding of major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and climate change.

• Prof Peter Sammonds IRDR Director profile webpage

Senior Press Officer

Tom joined the SMC in April 2008 and handles any issues in the fields of engineering, energy and the environment that hit the headlines.  He has degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics. He volunteered with the charity Sense About Science in summer 2007, contributing to their expose of pseudoscience and blogging for the Guardian along the way.

 Yumiko Horie is a Crisis Prevention and Recovery Programme Officer at the UNDP, who previously worked as a newspaper journalist.

More details soon.

Sir David Omand was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that Director of GCHQ (the UK Sigint Agency). Previously, in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy, he was particularly concerned with long term strategy, with the British military contribution in restoring peace in the former Yugoslavia and the recasting of British nuclear deterrence policy at the end of the Cold War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary during the Falklands conflict, and served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK Defence Counsellor. He has been a visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies since 2005-6. His book, Securing the State, was published in 2010.

Ian Davis is an expert in Disaster Management, an author of the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) report on "Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation"(SREX), and a visiting professor at Copenhagen, Lund, Kyoto, and Oxford Brookes Universities. With a background in architecture/ planning, he was the founder and first director of the Disaster Management Centre in Oxford Brookes University, and the first Professor of Disaster Management and Development in Cranfield University. He has country experience in more than 20 disaster stricken countries mostly in Africa and Latin America.

We are seeking poster abstracts on 'Building resilience to natural disasters'. We would like to see contributions from a wide range of disciplines, considering any aspect of how to build resilience through understanding the nature and likelihood of the disaster, through building structures and planning towns and infrastructure to be more resilient to disasters, through planning for the response during and immediately after disasters, through building financial resilience, and/or through building societal resilience. We are also interested in applying this to all natural disasters or combinations of them.

The maximum word length is 300 words, and we have now extended the deadline for abstract submission to Tues 7th May.  Please send abstracts torosanna.smith[at]ucl.ac.uk, which should include the title, names and affiliations of all authors, and the abstract text.

Will be published here after the submission deadline on Tues 7th May.