Staff and student achievements 2025-6

Staff achievements

We celebrated achievements across professional services, research and teaching.

Advance HE recognition

• Dr Bayes Ahmed was appointed a fellow for contributions to our teaching community.
• Dr Aeron O’Connor and Dr Rozana Himaz were appointed senior fellows, reflecting our commitment to high‑quality, inclusive education.

Staff awards and recognition

We were recognised across UCL and internationally for excellence in research, teaching and impact.

• The department received the Athena Swan Bronze Award that recognises and encourages commitment to advancing gender equality in higher education and research.
• Dr Bayes Ahmed was awarded a grant by the UCL Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) for his project, ‘Towards a National Framework for Landslide Early Warning in Bangladesh’.
• Professor Mark Pelling contributed to UCL’s new Climate Change Perspectives resource, bringing UCL RDR expertise into student induction and teaching across the university.
• Claire Meade was recognised in the UCL Mathematical and Physical Sciences Alumni Engagement Ideas Awards 2025.
• Professor Ilan Kelman received the 2026 Professor Douglas Paton Distinguished Researcher Lifetime Legacy Award and the Geoethics Medal 2025, and was elected to Academia Europaea.
• Professor Punam Yadav featured in ‘Faces of UCL’, a project recognising the achievements of UCL’s diverse, global community of staff, students and partners.
• Maciej Pawlik and Professor Joanna Faure Walker were appointed to the steering committee of the UK Alliance for Disaster Research (UKADR), representing early career researchers and leading on external partnerships respectively.
• Professor Joanna Faure Walker was elected to the UCL Education Committee by the Academic Board.
• Professor Joanna Faure Walker was elected onto the UCL Research Degrees Committee by the Academic Board.
• Many of our staff featured on the UCL Student Choice Awards 2026 Roll of Honour, in the following categories:
  • Active student partnership: Dr Eslam Elbaaly
  • Amazing support staff: Mumtaz Abdul‑Ghafoor
  • Brilliant research‑based education: Dr Saman Ghaffarian and Dr Ting Sun
  • Excellent personal tutoring: Dr Aeron O’Connor and Dr Stefan Leeffers
  • Inspiring teaching delivery: Professor Ilan Kelman and Professor Mohammad Shamsudduha
  • Outstanding research supervision: Dr Dan Haines, Professor Ilan Kelman, Professor Joanna Faure Walker and Dr Saman Ghaffarian
• Dr Rozana Himaz received an honourable mention award for outstanding paper at the Political Science Association conference and co-led international teaching collaboration on innovative risk financing with students from universities in Japan, Indonesia and the UK.
• Dr Roberto Gentile won the UCL Unitemps Hiring Manager of the Year award for outstanding supervision and support on a research internship.

Student success stories

• Emma Greenwood was awarded the RDR Cup, recognising her exceptional contribution to the department beyond her academic studies.
• Niyamat Kapoor, Global Humanitarian Studies BSc student, spoke as part of the parliamentary visit with Dewa Trust Foundation, advocating for girls’ education in Afghanistan.
• Emma Greenwood was shortlisted for the UCL Students’​ Union ‘Societies Personality of the Year’ and ‘Outstanding contribution to societies’ awards.
• The UCL Disaster Risk Reduction and Humanitarianism Society (UCL DRRH Society) won the Society Sports Award at the UCL Students’​ Union End of Year Awards, for their football team, the ‘Disaster Dribblers’. The society was also shortlisted for the:
  • Outstanding Contribution to Professional Development Award
  • Volunteering Society of the Year
  • Event of the Year

• Yohei Miura, co-supervised by Professor Mohammad Shamsudduha and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tohoku University, Japan, received the University Presidential Award in recognition of his outstanding doctoral research on the ‘Development of a Satellite-based Framework for Monitoring and Predicting Algal Blooms in Inland Water Bodies’.
• Denisa Tami (UCL Risk, Disaster and Resilience MSc 2025), supervised by Dr Roberto Gentile, presented her MSc thesis at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly.
• Emma Roberts’ (UCL Risk, Disaster and Resilience MSc 2024), dissertation project, supervised by Dr Ting Sun, was recognised with a Highly Commended distinction after submission to the Adeline Stuart-Watt Dissertation Award on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.
• Dr Sam Mitchell, supervised by Professor Joanna Faure Walker, won the Natural Sciences PhD prize in Birkbeck for his PhD ‘Spatio-temporal variations of slip on active normal faults in central mainland Greece’.

Student publications

Our students contributed new insights to the fields of disasters, risk and resilience.

• Lagap, U., Ghaffarian, S., Gelinas-Gagne, S., Jilma, J., Liu, Z. and Luo, Z. (2025) Towards reliable deep learning for post-disaster damage assessment: An XAI-based evaluation, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 130, p. 105839.
• Mitchell, S., Sgambato, C., Robertson, J., Roberts, G.P., Faure Walker, J., Mildon, Z., Ganas, A., Papanikolaou, I., Iezzi, F., Beck, J., Binnie, S.A., Dunai, T., López, D.A., Deligiannakis, G., Mechernich, S., Reicherter, K. & Rugen, E.J. (2025) Multi‑millennia slip rate relationships between closely spaced across‑strike faults: Temporal earthquake clustering of the Skinos and Pisia Faults, Greece, from in situ 36Cl cosmogenic exposure dating, Journal of Structural Geology, 198, 105445.
• Moreau, A. and Dryhurst, S. (2025) Exploring the concept of “community resilience”: A case study of Scottish emergency management discourse and its practical implications for the city of Glasgow, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 129, p. 105766.
• Rahman, A.Z., Shamsudduha, M., Haq, M.I., Hanif, M., Islam, M.S., Islam, S.S., Biswas, A. and Taylor, R.G. (2026). Oil and river water salinity dynamics in coastal Bangladesh, Scientific Reports, 16, p.1044.
• Ruprecht, M.N. and Ayeb-Karlsson, S. (2025) Displaced by climate, marginalised by the State: Afro-Colombians in Medellín, Forced Migration Review, 76 (Climate change: Choices for displaced people), October.
• Tami, D., Gentile, R., Prabhu, S., & Carenzo, M. (2026). Machine Learning for Liquefaction Hazard Mapping: A Case Study for New Zealand. In European Geophysical Union General Assembly.
• Yore, R., Fearnley, C., Fordham, M., and Kelman, I. (2025). Disability‑inclusive warnings. In An Introduction to Disability Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction: Intersecting Terrains, 229–250.
• Yore, R., Faure Walker, J., and Suppasri, A. (2025). Transitions to recovery: The shelter and housing journey following disaster. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 128, 105726. 

PhD updates

We welcomed new researchers and celebrated doctoral milestones.

New PhD Students

• Qi Cheng
• Simon Peter Collerton
• Beth Dunstan
• Duncan Martin
• Erika Werth

PhD completions

• Nicole Paul (December 2025): Population displacement following disasters.
• Mhari Gordon (January 2026): Displaced people’s experiences of natural hazards, disasters, and warnings.
• Dan Thompson (January 2026): Leveraging disaster insurance and financial instruments as policy tools to reduce disaster risk.
• Umut Lagap (January 2026): Integrating digital twin and machine learning for hazard‑agnostic post‑disaster recovery management.
• Arifin (January 2026): Groundwater characteristics and hydrostratigraphy of the Lower Kutai Basin, Indonesia.
• Sam Mitchell (February 2026): Spatio-temporal variations of slip on active normal faults in central mainland Greece.