EWB Panel Talks Series: Engineering in Emergencies and Challenging Environments

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• Professor David Alexander, Mr Yu Jia, Dr Kate Crawford, Cambridge Development Initiative
• Tuesday 12 March 2013, 19:00-21:00
• Old Combination Room (OCR), Trinity College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact ja485.

Join us for our fourth (and last) installment in the EWB Panel Talks series for this term at 7pm on the 12th of March!

https://www.facebook.com/events/136735926500472/

About the speakers:

Professor David Alexander

Prof David Alexander is currently the professor of Risk and Disaster Reduction at the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. Prof Alexander teaches emergency planning and management and has research interests in this field, as well as earthquake disaster analysis. His books include “Natural Disasters”, “Confronting Catastrophe” and “Principles of Emergency Planning and Management”. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Co-Editor of Disasters journal, and is a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management. He graduated in Geography from the London School of Economics, and obtained his PhD in Mediterranean geomorphology from UCL . In the 1980s he devised the equivalent of the Mercalli scale for landslide damage to buildings and settlements and published papers on the early history of geomorphology and analyses of the work of Dante and Leonardo da Vinci.

Mr Yu Jia

Yu Jia was born in China and grew up in Kuwait. He graduated with a Masters in Electromechanical Engineering from the University of Southampton in 2010 with First Class Honours and is currently in the third year of his PhD here at Cambridge, researching and developing next generation energy harvesters. The research focus is centred on vibrational dynamics as well as MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical system) technology that could be used to facilitate Structural Health Monitoring systems that can help in the damage detection and characterisation strategy for engineering structures, which can be especially useful in emergency situations. His PhD research so far has generated a patent application, two conference papers, 1 journal paper and 1 invited journal as part of a special issue. Cambridge Enterprise is currently commercialising the technology.

Dr Kate Crawford

Kate is part of the Centre for Urban Sustainability and Resilience at UCL after leaving the Quarry Battery Company, a start-up working to introduce a new generation of pumped hydro-electric storage into the UK energy market. Before that she worked for a variety of private and not-for-profit organisations, including a spell with CARE UK as a Shelter Field Advisor, mainly in Haiti. She was at Newnham College and CUED from 1996-2000 after a gap year with the British Army in Germany.

Also, an introduction to the Cambridge Development Initiative

A new and ambitious student-led development effort that will pursue an engineering programme as part of a wider strategy of enhancing entrepreneurship and civil society leadership in a community of the urban poor. The Initiative will deploy an engineering scheme as one of six interconnected and interdependent programmes which also include advocacy, microfinance, management assistance, health and school teaching.

This talk is part of the Engineers Without Borders Panel Talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Chris Davis' list
• Engineers Without Borders Panel Talks
• Featured talks
• Guy Emerson's list
• Old Combination Room (OCR), Trinity College, Trinity Street, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ
• custom

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