David Alexander is Professor of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London (UCL). He graduated in geography at the London School of Economics and obtained his PhD in Mediterranean geomorphology from UCL.
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Over the period 2003-7 he was Scientific Director of the Advanced School of Civil Protection of the regional government of Lombardy. As a Professor the University of Florence (2005-11) he was a leading member of the team that designed, launched and taught Italy's first Master of Civil Protection course. Alexander is Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bournemouth and Northumbria (UK), Coimbra (Portugal) and Lund (Sweden) and Research Fellow at the Global Risk Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Alexander's book Natural Disasterswas published in London and New York in 1993 and has frequently been reprinted. His subsequent books include Confronting Catastrophe (2000), Principles of Emergency Planning and Management (2002), Recovery from Disaster (with Ian Davis, 2015) and How to Write an Emergency Plan (2016).
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David Alexander is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier's International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and was formerly Co-Editor of Disasters journal. He is a member of the editorial boards of 14 academic journals. He is Vice-President and Chairman of the Trustees of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management, which is the oldest learned society in the field of disaster reduction. In 2013 Alexander won the Distinguished Research Award of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM).
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She is a Professor in Computational Resilience Economics at the University of Twente (the Netherlands), which she joined in 2010. In September 2017, she also joined University of Technology Sydney (Australia) as Professor of Computational Economic Modeling working with spatial simulation models to study socioeconomic impacts of disasters and emergence of resilience across scales.
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Her research line focuses on exploring how behavioral changes at micro level may lead to critical transitions (tipping points/regime shifts) on macro level in complex adaptive human-environment systems in application to climate change economics. She uses agent-based modelling (ABM) combined with social science methods of behavioral data collection on individual decisions and social networks.
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This research line has been distinguished by the NWO VENI and ERC Starting grants and the Early Career Excellence award of the International Environmental Modeling Society (iEMSs).
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She is Associate Editor of the Environmental Modelling & Software journal.
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Carolina Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina where she directs the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. Her primary research interests are in the area of disaster vulnerability/resilience science—what makes people and the places where they live vulnerable to extreme events and how vulnerability and resilience are measured, monitored, and assessed. She has authored or edited thirteen books, more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She has provided expert testimony to Congress on hazards and vulnerability
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Dr. Cutter serves on many national advisory boards and committees including those of National Research Council (NRC), the AAAS, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Natural Hazards Center (Boulder, CO), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She also serves as Vice-Chair of the international Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Science Committee supported by ISSC, ICSU, and UN-ISDR.
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Dr. Cutter is co-executive editor of Environment and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford University Research Encyclopedias: Natural Hazards Science. She was a coordinating lead author of Chapter 5 of the IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation as well as a convening lead author a chapter of the US Third National Climate Assessment on urban systems, infrastructure, and vulnerability.