IRDR Teaching and Training Forum

The UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR) is seeking to engage the UCL research community in exploring opportunities and generating fresh ideas in cross research council inter-disciplinary PhD training in risk and disaster reduction. To do this we wish to draw upon the breadth of UCL's expertise, from natural sciences, medicine and population health, engineering and the built environment, sociology and economics, geography and anthropology, laws and ethics, and mathematics and statistics.

We aim to stimulate the training of research students who have inter-disciplinary skills that bridge the usual research council divisions. This would anticipate moves by RCUK (and the EU) towards a greater focus on training of PhD students in inter-disciplinary cohorts, and would enable UCL to pilot such a scheme. UCL is already recognised for its innovative approach to developing research student training, which we aim to capitalise on.

To initiate the process, UCL staff are invited to the second IRDR Teaching and Training Forum on Wednesday 15 June at 4-6 pm in Malet Place Engineering room 1.03. The meeting will begin with a keynote presentation by Mark Burgess on RCUK Studentships, and will be followed by a number of short presentations reflecting research council areas and European opportunities. The meeting will then be open for discussion.

From the Forum we aim to cohere a group of potential supervisors who will bring forward a range of inter-disciplinary PhD studentship proposals in the broad area of risk and disaster reduction. Participants are asked to register their interest with Stephen Edwards (s.edwards@ucl.ac.uk).