Hydro-Meteorological Hazards, Risks, and Disasters

Paolo is a Senior Lecturer at IHE Delft in the River Basin Development research group. He has more than 15 years of combined professional experience in the Humanitarian, Professional and Academic world in the areas of mapping, geology and geomorphology and remote sensing. In the last years he has been developing methods and tools for the use of UAV in hydraulic research including flood mapping as well as in ecology and soil erosion. He has worked and lived extensively in Eastern and Southern Africa with shorter assignments in Asia and East Asia, and at present he is based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Dr. John (Jack) F. Shroder received his bachelor's degree in geology from Union College in 1961; his masters in geology from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst in 1963, and his Ph.D. in geology at the University of Utah in 1967. He has been actively pursuing research on landforms and natural resources in the high mountain environments of the Rocky Mountains, the Afghanistan Hindu Kush, and the Karakoram Himalaya of Pakistan for over a half century. His teaching specialties have been primarily geomorphology, but also physical and historical geology and several other courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where he was the founding professor of the Geology major. While there he was instrumental in founding the Center for Afghanistan Studies in 1972, and he was the lead geologist for the Bethsaida Archaeological Project in Israel in the 1990s. He taught geology as an NSF-, USAID, and Fulbright-sponsored professor at Kabul University in 1977-78, as well as a Fulbright award to Peshawar University in 1983-84. He has some 63 written or edited books to his credit and more than 200 professional papers, with emphases on landslides, glaciers, flooding, and mineral resources in Afghanistan. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received Distinguished Career awards from both the Mountain and the Geomorphology Specialty Groups of the Association of American Geographers. In the recent decade as an Emeritus Professor, he served as a Trustee of the Geological Society of America Foundation where he set up a research scholarship, the Shroder Mass Movement award for masters and doctoral candidates. For the past two decades, he has been the Editor-in-Chief for the Developments in Earth Surface Processes book series of Elsevier Publishing, as well as the 10-volumes of the Treatise on Geomorphology, and the Hazards, Risks, and Disasters book series, both in second editions. Recently, Dr. Shroder was ranked among the top 2 percent of researchers worldwide by the October study conducted by Stanford University. Giuliano Di Baldassarre is a Professor of Hydrology at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University (Sweden) and the Director of CNDS, Centre of Natural Hazards & Disaster Science (www.cnds.se). His research deals primarily with droughts and floods in changing environments, with a focus on the dynamics and risks generated by feedback mechanisms between physical, technical and social processes. He has received many international prizes, such as the EGU Young Scientist Award and the AGU Early Career Award, along with major honors, such as the ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for his project HydroSocialExtremes: Unravelling the mutual shaping of hydrological extremes and society. He is currently the Chair of Panta Rhei-Everything Flows, the research decade of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), which brings together hundreds of scientists worldwide doing research on water and society.