UCL IRDR Annual Conference 2011

Paul is head of the Actuarial and Enterprise Risk Management practice within Aon Benfield's International Analytics team. Aon Benfield is the largest reinsurance broker in the works and is part of Aon Corporation, the leading global provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage and human capital consulting.

Paul has wide ranging practical experience from underwriting, reinsurance analysis and strategy to capital modelling and has worked with a number of large European and global insurance and reinsurance groups. Prior to joining Benfield Greig in 2000, Paul worked for Commercial Union / CGU in the UK for 13 years. He is a Mathematics graduate and a Chartered Insurance Broker and Associate of the Chartered Insurance Institute.

Christopher Kilburn is a volcanologist in the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL. His research has concentrated on understanding the physical controls on volcanic and landslide processes, with the aims of developing practical methods for forecasting hazards and designing effective methods for communicating forecasts to emergency planners and vulnerable communities. He has participated in emergency responses to eruptions in Italy, Cameroon and the West Indies and is currently Director of the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Centre.

John McCloskey is Professor of Geophysics at the University of Ulster in N. Ireland. His main research interests are in the evolution of stress on faults and fault system from the time scale of earthquake stress interaction (a few seconds) to multi-seismic cycle loading and unloading (on the order of hundreds of years). His research aims to identify regions of particularly high seismic hazard - seismic hazard hotspots. He works with NGOs in attempting to increase awareness of earthquake hazard and to encourage detailed preparation for near future shocks.

Dave Tappin is a Principal Researcher with the British Geological Survey, and Visiting Professor in the Earth Sciences Department at UCL. He is a marine geologist by training, working in the UK and internationally for over 35 years. Since 1999 he has been studying tsunamis sourced from submarine landslides, volcanic collapse and earthquakes. Since the Tohoku EQ and tsunami of March 11th Dave has visited Japan twice, researching the tsunami impact and the sediments laid down during inundation.

Adriana Allen is a senior lecturer at the UCL Development Planning Unit (DPU), with over 20 years of research and consultancy experience in the socio-environmental processes of change faced in the context of the urban global south. Over the years, her work in various urban regions in Latin America, Africa and Asia has focused on water poverty, the governance of service provision for the urban poor, citizen service co-production in water and sanitation and grassroots and planned responses to climate variability.

Within UCL she currently supports a number a university wide initiatives in the realm of urban sustainability, including her work as the UCL Environment Institute Co-Director for Sustainable Cities. In 2010 she led a UCL Grand Challenge initiative together with Sarah Bell (UCL CEGE), entitled 'Glass half empty? Urban water poverty halfway through the Decade of Water for Life'. She is Visiting Professor at various universities in Latin America and Europe and Co-editor of the International Journal of Sustainable Urban Development.

Willy Burgess is Senior Lecturer in Hydrogeology at UCL, and was previously with the British Geological Survey. He directed the UCL MSc course in Hydrogeology & Groundwater Resources, 1990-2000. He is interested in the combined influences of hydrological and geochemical processes on groundwater, especially on the vulnerability of groundwater to contamination and/or depletion.

He works on:

• Arsenic in alluvial groundwater systems in the Bengal Basin
• Fluoride in crystalline bedrock / regolith aquifers (East Africa, India)
• Contaminant solutes in the double-porosity Chalk aquifer of the UK
• The hydrogeology of urban environments (Dhaka, Bangladesh; London, UK)

Francis McDonagh has worked on South American development issues for over twenty years. He is currently Andes programme manager for CAFOD, with responsibility for the organisation's work in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

Dr Randolph Kent, Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme, King's College, London, has more than 25 years' practical and policy engagement in the provision of emergency assistance, mainly serving with the United Nations in situations of both natural disaster and conflict. He served as UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Kosovo and Rwanda, Chief of the UN Emergency Unit in Sudan and Chief of Emergency Prevention and Preparedness in Ethiopia. He was also Special Advisor to the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs from 1995-6. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Sobona Mtisi is a Research Officer at the Overseas Development Institute, Water Policy Programme, with a background in sociology, demography, and holds a PhD in International Development. Sobona has over seven years research experience on water governance and policy processes and their implications on social and economic development in southern Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe. His current research interest focuses on the contributions of water to growth and development in the context of climate change in Africa. Currently, Sobona is leading a climate change and development project in Zimbabwe working with government agencies, research and academic institutions, civil society organisation and NGOs. The project is aimed at developing a National Climate Change and Development Strategy for the country with contributions from a broad spectrum of organisations.

Beth walker is researcher and commissioning editor for the Third Pole (www.thethirdpole.net), a chinadialogue project that aims to inform, debate and foster constructive cooperation on the regional environmental and climate crisis in the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. Beth is a fluent Chinese speaker and has worked extensively in Beijing and southwest China for health and environmental NGOs. She is co-author of the report "Waters of the Third Pole: sources of threat, sources of survival". She has an MSc in Development Management from the LSE and a first class BA in Chinese from Oxford University.

During the past 15 years Furedi's studies have been devoted to an exploration of the cultural developments that influence the construction of contemporary risk consciousness. His research has been oriented towards the way that risk and uncertainty is managed by contemporary culture. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology. His, Invitation To Terror; Expanding the Empire of the Unknown (2007) explores the way in which the threat of terrorism has become amplified through the ascendancy of possibilistic thinking. It develops the arguments contained in two previous books The Culture of Fear (2003) and Paranoid Parenting (2001). Both of these works investigate the interaction between risk consciousness and perceptions of fear, trust relations and social capital in contemporary society. In recent years he has worked on a variety of ESRC and EU funded research project on risk related issues. He is currently engaged in the study of the relationship between resilience and uncertainty.

Contact details:
SSPSSR
University of Kent Canterbury
Kent
CT2 7NF
United Kingdom
e: Frank.Furedi@gmail.com
w: www.frankfuredi.com

Professor Virginia Murray is Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection at the Health Protection Agency and a Visiting Professor in Health Protection at King's College London. Virginia qualified in medicine and has considerable experience in advising on toxicological and environmental public health aspects of response to acute and chronic chemical and extreme event incidents. In heading the new Extreme Events and Health Protection section, she is taking forward work on evidence base information and advice on flooding, heat, cold, volcanic ash, and other extreme weather and natural hazards events. Virginia has been the UK Government member on the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Scientific and Technical Committee since 2008. She is a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, due for publication in 2011.