dr Gemma Cremen(ucl)

Dr Gemma Cremen is Lecturer of Risk and Resilience Engineering within the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at UCL, where she is also Co-Director of the DE|RISC (Disaster Engineering for Resilient Societies) Lab.

Gemma’s research focus is at the intersection of civil engineering and other related disciplines, with the aim of facilitating multi-hazard risk- and resilience-informed decision making for a better tomorrow’s world.

She has co-authored over 30 journal publications, including an Editors’ Highlight in Nature Communications. Gemma was previously a (Senior) Research Fellow (in Civil Engineering) and a Research Associate (in Geophysics) at UCL and the University of Bristol, respectively. She completed her PhD in Earthquake Engineering at Stanford University in 2019.

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professor jon tawn (lancaster university)

Professor Jonathan Tawn is a Distinguished Professor of Statistics at Lancaster University, renowned for his expertise in extreme value theory and its diverse applications. He earned his BSc in Mathematics from Imperial College London in 1985 and completed his PhD in Statistics at the University of Surrey in 1988 under the supervision of Richard L. Smith. He served as Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2000 to 2007 and has been the director of the STOR-i Doctoral Training Centre since 2010.

Professor Tawn’s research focuses on extreme value theory, developing statistical methods to estimate the probability of rare events. These methods have been applied across various fields, including oceanography, hydrology, climatology, reliability, economics, reinsurance, finance, medicine, and sport.

Professor Tawn has received numerous accolades, including the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Bronze (1993), the Barnett Award for contributions to environmental statistics (2015) and the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Silver (2024).

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amanda penistone

Amanda is Head of International Climate Finance Analysis at the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

She leads a large multidisciplinary analytical team providing analytical support throughout the lifecycle of UK International Climate Finance programmes, from assessing value for money of options, through monitoring results, to evaluating impacts. She’s also the UK government representative on the RSS Climate Change and Net Zero taskforce. Before working on International Climate Finance, she headed up the UK’s greenhouse gas inventory.

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Dr Clair barnes

Clair is a Research Associate at the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, investigating the impacts of climate change on extreme weather. She holds a PhD in Statistical Science from University College London, where she developed models for quantifying uncertainties associated with multi-model ensemble forecasts, particularly within a multivariate Bayes Linear framework.

Since 2022 she has worked with the World Weather Attribution initiative, attributing changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events to climate change. Her research focuses on ways to improve probabilistic attribution methodologies to obtain more robust results and understand more about the factors driving changes in extreme weather events.

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mark naylor

Mark Naylor is a Reader in Computational Geoscience and Hazard Research at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences. Inspired by a love of the outdoors, his research explores how mountains grow, landscapes evolve, and natural hazards emerge in dynamic Earth systems. Mark employs computational, statistical, and mathematical methods to deepen our understanding of these processes.

He is the Academic Lead for IT within the School of GeoSciences and a Senior Member of the NERC Constructing a Digital Environment Expert Network. His work includes developing tools like the ETAS.inlabru package for seismic forecasting and contributing to the Edinburgh-Seismicity-Hub GitHub repository.

Mark’s current research interests range from seismic monitoring of mountain rivers to statistical earthquake forecasting and carbon capture. He actively shares his insights and methods through his blog and public GitLab repository, promoting interdisciplinary approaches to geoscience challenges.