INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | FOCUS | PERSPECTIVES | BIOS
Alex
Densmore
A large part of Alex’s research is devoted
to understanding how earthquakes
affect the landscape, creating a range
of secondary hazards which lie at the
core of the IHRR programme ‘When the
Shaking Stops’. His research also has
to do with the way mountain ranges are
built and destroyed – that is, with the
interactions between earthquakes and
active tectonic processes that create high
topography and the erosional processes
(which are often hazards in themselves)
that pull mountains back down again.
This requires: looking at the landscape to
find evidence of past earthquakes, finding
out where and how active the faults are,
and determining when the most recent
earthquakes took place. While searching
for signs of earthquakes that occurred
in the past, Alex is also researching the
environmental impacts of groundwater
extraction in northwestern India under
past, present and future climate
conditions. This research investigates
how groundwater used for irrigation in the
region is dependent upon local geology,
such as the presence or absence of
buried river channels. Predicted changes
in the Indian monsoon over the next 50100 years influenced by climate change
could have serious, but largely unknown
effects on this critical resource.
Sarah
Curtis
As the director of Frontier Knowledge
programme at IHRR, Sarah is generally
interested in how different projects led by
IHRR researchers break with convention
in order to think in new ways about
hazard, risk and resilience. IHRR aims to
bring together researchers from different
disciplines to find original ways to study
many of the complex problems the world
faces today because no single discipline
provides sufficient expertise to tackle
issues of hazard, risk and resilience in
a comprehensive way.
Many of the projects fostered through
IHRR bring together experts in the
humanities, social and physical sciences.
This produces novel ways to think about
the ‘whole systems’ that are important for
hazard and risk and for vulnerability and
resilience. Sarah’s own research focuses
on the links between human health and
the social and physical environment. It
shows how and why places are important
for our health as well as our individual
characteristics and the medical care
we use.
Much of her research fits well with the
interdisciplinary model that IHRR is aiming
to encourage. For example, environmental
impacts, including climate change, play
a large role in human health and can also
affect the operation of health and social care
services that we need to use to maintain our
health. This is the focus of one of IHRR’s
core research projects, Built Infrastructure
for Old People’s Care in Conditions of
Climate Change (BIOPICCC). Sarah is
one of two principal investigators leading
BIOPICCC.
Katie
Oven
Katie is a geographer working at the
interface of physical and social science,
with an interest in disaster risk reduction
in the context of geophysical and
hydrometeorological hazards. Her doctoral
research investigated the vulnerability
and resilience of rural communities to
landslides and debris flows in the Nepal
Himalaya. The study examined local
perceptions and understandings of
mass movement hazards and the
factors giving rise to the occupation
of landslide-prone areas.
Katie’s findings led her to re-evaluate
the roles of both local and outside
scientific knowledge in landslide risk
reduction. Since completing her PhD
in 2009, Katie has been working as
a Post-Doctoral Research Associate
on the multidisciplinary BIOPICCC
(Built Infrastructure for Older People’s
Care in Conditions of Climate Change)
project funded by the EPSRC. The
study investigates the impact of extreme
weather events (heatwaves, coldwaves
and floods) on the built infrastructure
supporting older people’s health and
social care delivery in the UK. She has
also continued her work in Nepal as
part of a NERC/ESRC-funded scoping
study: ‘Increasing Rural Resilience
in Seismically Active Areas’. Working
with local partners, the study sought to
develop a conceptual and methodological
approach for combining local, practitioner
and scientific knowledge for effective
risk reduction in the context of seismicrelated hazards.
Folarin
Akinbami
Folarin is a legal scholar on Work
Package 2 (WP2) of the Tipping
Points project: ‘Financial Crisi