Caglar Akgungor

Caglar Akgungor has graduated from the Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration at Galatasaray University, Istanbul, Turkey. He holds a MA and a PhD degree in Political Science from the Grenoble Institute of Political Studies, University of Grenoble, France. His main research interests lie in the social and political dimensions of risk and disaster issues, risk perception, decision making and public policy making regarding emergencies and extreme events. Author of various scientific publications, including the first disaster sociology study of Turkey, Akgüngör works as a consultant on disaster management; he also teaches at Galatasaray University. Dr. Akgungor has led the development of an inclusive, disability-adapted public disaster training program in EDUCEN Project as the Istanbul Case Study coordinator, and currently focuses on diversity and disability in disaster risk management.

Funda Atun

Funda Atun is an urban planner with a PhD degree in Spatial Planning and Urban Development from Politecnico di Milano (2013). She has currently a post-doc position at Politecnico di Milano in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies. Since 2008, she has participated in a number of EU funded projects (FP6, FP7, Horizon 2020, INTERREG). In addition to being the author and co-author of several articles/book contributions, she is the author of the book called “Improving Societal Resilience to Disasters. A case study of London’s Transportation system”. She is qualified in urban policy analysis, disaster risk management, transportation systems and complex system analysis. Besides, she is the founding president of “The Others and Disasters” (Gli Altri ed i Disastri) non-profit organization, which aims to enhance resilience of disadvantaged people against natural disasters.

Karina Barquet

Karina Barquet is a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute. She has a background in Human Geography (PhD) from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Development Studies (MSc) from Lund University, and Peace and Conflict Studies (BA) from Malmö University. Her research focuses on the political and social dimensions of environmental governance. Key themes include environmental security, transnational governance, political ecology, border studies, and politics of scale. In her work, she has explored the ways in which global discourses of risk, environmental governance, and security are translated and understood in specific geographies, and how local needs and responses to global changes can in turn shape policy.

Manuel Bea

Manuel Bea is a freelance consultant at ICATALIST. He holds a PhD in Geography and an Environmental Science degree. He has more than 14 years of experience in the design and implementation of projects related with remote sensing and GIS, mainly applied to the inventory and balance of water resources use and demand, agriculture, landscape planning and environment. He has also worked in different applied research projects under EU Framework and LIFE programmes. He has been a teacher in the last editions of the Master on Environmental Management of the Instituto de Empresa (IE). His current focus is on the water management and governance studies and on the elaboration of project proposals for research, development and open innovation.

Kees Boersma

Kees Boersma is Associate Professor at the VU University Amsterdam in the department of Organization Science. His research interest is in crisis management, disaster studies, and safety and security. He is project leader of AREA, the Amsterdam Research on Emergency Administration in which he works together with practitioners on crisis management issues. He is the coordinator of the project ‘Enhancing smart disaster governance: Assessing the potential of the net-centric approach’, funded by Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (http://disastergovernance.info/), and co-funded by Dutch Safety Regions, the Netherlands Institute for Physical Safety and by Oxfam-Novib and Cordaid. He is an elected board member of the ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) association, and a member of the editorial board of Organization Studies and the International Journal of Emergency Services. Homepage: www.keesboersma.com.

Robert Coates

Dr. Robert Coates is a human geographer and lecturer in disaster studies at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Specialising in the politics of urban landslides and floods, particularly in Brazil, his interests lie in how vulnerability and resilience manifest among different social groups, and how this relates to state approaches to defined ‘natural’ and ‘social’ phenomena. Robert previously worked at King’s College London, where his PhD was also awarded.

Miranda Dandoulaki

Dr. Miranda Dandoulaki has studied civil engineering (NTUA 1981). She holds an MSc in regional development (Panteion University 1988) and a PhD in urban planning (NTUA 2008) both on earthquake protection. She has worked for Earthquake Planning and Protection Organization of Greece (1994-2002) and has served as Vice Director of the European Centre for the Prevention and Forecasting of Earthquakes. In the years 2004-2008 she was employed as a scientific officer in the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen of EC/Joint Research Centre and contributed in research on security of critical infrastructure. She was then appointed by the Greek National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (2008-2010) to support training on civil protection.

Karen Engel

Karen Engel is both an academic and (freelance) consultant. Over the years she worked as a researcher, trainer, coach, and facilitator, mostly in the fields of risk, crisis, and disaster management. Through her work she seeks to enable community actors, including public and private entities, to embrace and engage change. Even sudden, unforeseen, and perceived hazardous change. This is key to secure sustainability and progress in the face of a future that is more and more uncertain, complex and volatile.

Georg Frerks

Georg Frerks holds a chair in Conflict Prevention and Conflict Management at Utrecht University and a chair in International Security Studies at the Netherlands Defense Academy. He established Wageningen Disaster Studies and was the first chair-holder of Disaster Studies from 1997 till 2014. After obtaining his PhD at Wageningen University, Frerks served for nearly twenty years in the Dutch Foreign Service both at headquarters and abroad, and was head of the Conflict Research Unit of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations ‘Clingendael’. In his current capacities he focuses on contemporary conflicts and disasters, and local responses as well as policies and interventions implemented at international and national levels. Frerks has conducted extensive fieldwork in conflict and disaster-affected countries and areas, including Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the DRC, and Uganda. He has been working on the nexus culture-disaster for several years and has conducted numerous policy studies and program evaluations for international donors and NGOs.

Raffaele Giordano

Raffaele Giordano is Research Scientist at the Water Research Institute since 2005, with permanent position from February 2010. His main research field concerns the integration of scientific and stakeholders knowledge to develop decision support tool for water resources management. Current research activities are dealing with participatory modelling for conflict analysis in drought management; interactions mechanisms and collective actions for water management; analysis of ambiguity in risk perception. He is currently investigating the suitability of different modelling approaches – e.g. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, Bayesian Belief Networks, System Dynamic Modelling, Social Network Modelling – to simulate the complex network of interaction among decision makers, decisions and actions in a multi-agent decision-making environment

Lukasz Jarzabek

Lukasz Jarzabek is game designer at the Centre for Systems Solutions. He participated in design of many games and policy exercises related to DRM, sustainability and climate change. Since 2012 he has been running online webinars with simulation games for players from all over the world.

Helena de Jong

Helena de Jong is project manager at the Netherlands Defence Academy where she works in the HORIZON 2020 funded EDUCEN project on culture and disaster. Her research explores the role of memory in disaster and experiences with civil military interaction and culture in national contexts. She furthermore works for the University of Wageningen where she is part of the coordination team of the same EU project. Helena graduated with masters in international development, conflict studies, and international crimes. Her interests lie in the fields of conflict and culture, and integrating local knowledge and perceptions in policies and programs of international actors.

Michalina Kulakowska

Michalina Kulakowska is an author and editor at Games4Sustainability.org, a game designer at the Centre for Systems Solutions and a co-designer of the Gifts of Culture game. In her daily work, she focuses on serious games in the area of sustainability.

Elena Lopez-Gunn

She is ICATALIST director, a small company specializing in social innovationand knowledge transfer. She is a Cheney Fellow at Water@leedsand a collaborator at the Water Observatory from the Botin Foundation. She was an Alcoa Research Fellowat the London School of Economics. She has a PhD from King’s College, London and aMaster on Environment and Development from the University of Cambridge. She has collaborated with organizations like Transparency International Spain, the English Environment Agency, and UNDP. .Her areas of expertise include collective action, water resources management and governance, climate change adaptation, evaluation of public policies and social innovation.

Piotr Magnuszweski

Piotr Magnuszewski is the co-founder and managing director of the Centre for Systems Solutions. For many years he has been working as a systems modeler, professional trainer, facilitator and researcher. He has been applying and teaching systems tools with diverse groups of scientists, NGOs, businesses and administration in many countries. He designed and applied many simulation and role-playing games addressing the issues of complexity and sustainability.

Scira Menoni

Presently full professor at the Politecnico di Milano and teaches a course on risk management at the Geneva University, Switzerland. She has coordinated research units and projects funded by the EU Commission in the field of natural hazards. She coordinated the FP/ Know-4-drr (Enabling knowledge for disaster risk reductionin integration to climate change adaptation) and IDEA (Improying Damage assessments to Enhance cost-benefit Analyses) project funded by DG-ECHO. She has also partnered in cooperation projects with Central America and Mexico. Through university/public administration agreements she has and still is consulting governmental agencies on risk mitigation and management related issues.

Alessandro Pagano

Alessandro Pagano (Bari (IT), 1984) is a Civil Engineer (specialized in Hydraulics) and holds a PhD in Hydraulic engineering. He has currently a Post-Doc position at IRSA – CNR. His research activities primarily refer to: hydraulic systems analysis; physical analysis and the numerical modelling of hydraulic devices and cavitating flows; management of water resources; vulnerability assessment of water supply infrastructures and resilience analysis of critical infrastructures. He is currently investigating the suitability of different modelling approaches – e.g. Bayesian Belief Networks, System Dynamic Modelling, Social Network Modelling, Graph Theory – to simulate and analyze issues related to DRR and risk management.

Michal Pajak

Michal Pajak is a game designer at Centre for Systems Solutions. He participated in both national and international projects about serious games in research and education. He is interested in the subject of modeling social processes, which he pursues as a Ph.D. student at the Wrocław University of Economics.

Mona Regad

Mona Regad graduated from the MSc International Development Studies at Wageningen University & Research in 2016 and is currently working as an assistant at the Director’s office of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Co-operation ACP-EU (CTA). She completed her MSc thesis within the Disaster Studies group and conducted field research in Ladakh (India) among Buddhist communities affected by climate change. Committed to DRR and passionate about developing adaptive solutions using natural systems, she learnt from this experience about the importance of understanding how people view the world in order to pursue collaborative and meaningful work.

Marta Rica

Marta Rica is a researcher at the ICATALIST team. She has previously worked as a Consultant for UN-FAO in the Land and Water department. Marta completed a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid, focusing on the analysis of institutions for collective action for groundwater governance in Spain. During 2012-14, she carried out research on collective water supply in periurban Cochabamba, Bolivia, and worked with the German cooperation agency (GIZ) in rural semiarid areas of Bolivia on integral water harvesting projects. She holds a Master´s Degree in International Land and Water Resources Management from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Sebastiaan Rietjens

Dr. Sebastiaan Rietjens, an engineer by training, is an associate professor at the Netherlands Defence Academy. He has done extensive fieldwork in military exercises and operations (Afghanistan, Mali) and has published accordingly in international books and journals including Disasters, Armed Forces & Society, and International Journal of Public Administration. His main research focus is on intelligence, civil-military interaction as well as the effectiveness of military operations. Sebastiaan is a frequent speaker at international conferences and (research) institutes including NATO School, Australian Defence Forces Academy, Groningen University and Texas State University. He is a member of the editorial boards of Armed Forces & Society, the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management and editor of volumes on civil-military interaction (Ashgate, 2008; Springer, 2016), research methods in the military domain (Routledge, 2014) and organizing in the military (2016).

Aleksandra Solińska

Aleksandra Solińska is an editor at Games4Sustainability.org, an author and co-author of many articles related to serious games application to climate adaptation processes, DRM activities and sustainable development. In her daily work, she manages editorial, translational and transnational projects in the area of sustainability.

Peter Tamas

Peter Tamas is interested in the internal validity of measures in inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural research. He studies this, in part, in the context of policy relevant research in complicated (e.g. post-conflict) environments. He also studies internal validity in inter-disciplinary research through the lens of measurement error. For his PhD he used the case of international development bureaucrats to try and develop constructs and methods appropriate for the identification of the discourses that condition professionals’ conduct. Since then Peter has continued to work with military and civilian organizations that field staff into complicated environments.

Anne van Tilborg

Anne van Tilborg worked with EDUCEN as an intern from Integrated Safety and Security Studies at Hogeschool Utrecht.

Jeroen Warner

Dr Jeroen Warner teaches, trains and publishes on Disaster Studies at Wageningen University, where he took his PhD degree and is now Associate Professor. His main research interests in the disaster management domain are social resilience and participation, the politics and International Relations of (flood) disaster risk reduction and the International Relations of disaster risk reduction and disaster response. A founder member of the London Water Research Group, Jeroen also works on domestic and transboundary water conflict, participatory resource management, and governance issues. He is a co-editor of the International Journal of Water Governance and Regions and Cohesion, and an editor of Ambiente e Sociedade.

Jeroen Wolbers

Jeroen Wolbers is a Postdoctoral Researcher and lecturer at the Department of Organization Sciences, Faculty of Social Science at the VU Amsterdam. He studies how cross-boundary coordination is practiced in emergency management. His interest lies in exploring how the tension between organizational design and emergent, improvised response turns out in practice. Based on this tension he develops explanations about how coordination practices might lead to integration in one instance, while leading to fragmentation in another. His expertise lies in analyzing and researching complex organizational dilemmas in the area of coordination, technology, social networks, knowledge management and culture. Homepage: jeroenwolbers.com