Carmine Galasso | PhD
Professor of Catastrophe Risk Engineering
Vice-Dean (Research), Faculty of Engineering Sciences
Research Director, Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering
Deputy Departmental Graduate Tutor (Research Students)
University College London (UCL) | Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering | Chadwick Building 1.06 | Gower St | WC1E 6BT London | UK
Email: c.galasso@ucl.ac.uk
Welcome to the website for Carmine Galasso's research group
I am a Professor of Catastrophe Risk Engineering at University College London (UCL), UK, based in the Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering (CEGE).
My research develops and applies probabilistic, statistical and data-driven methods for catastrophe risk modelling and disaster risk reduction. With my group, I work across four connected areas: multi-hazard catastrophe risk modelling, including the effects of climate change; performance-based engineering and structural reliability; disaster recovery and community resilience; and risk-informed decision-making, including people-centred impacts such as displacement. Much of this work focuses on buildings and community infrastructure—such as schools, hospitals and heritage assets—in low- and middle-income countries, where vulnerability is often greatest and evidence-based risk reduction is most urgent. We work closely with (re)insurance partners including WTW, Howden Re and AXA.
I co-founded and co-lead the DE|RISC Lab (Disaster Engineering for Resilient Societies) at UCL with Dr Gemma Cremen and Dr Roberto Gentile. Spanning CEGE and UCL Risk and Disaster Reduction, the lab works at the intersection of civil engineering and other disciplines to support multi-hazard risk- and resilience-informed decision-making. Our ultimate goal is to provide society with a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable built environment.
Since October 2025, I have been Vice-Dean (Research) of UCL’s Faculty of Engineering Sciences, after a year as Deputy Vice-Dean (Research). In this role, I help shape and deliver the Faculty’s research strategy, including its major research themes, REF2029 planning, research capital, and new centres and institutes, with a particular focus on fostering a positive, inclusive research culture in which researchers and research-enabling staff at all career stages, particularly early-career researchers, can thrive. I am also Research Director of CEGE and a member of its Executive Management Team, and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (IJDRR).
Before joining UCL, I worked as a Catastrophe Risk Modeller at Applied Insurance Research (AIR) Worldwide (now Verisk), San Francisco, USA, and as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Performance-based Earthquake Engineering Laboratory, at the University of California, Irvine, USA. I earned my PhD in Earthquake Risk at the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy, in January 2011.
My research is supported by a range of funding bodies and partners, including UK Research and Innovation and its Research Councils, the European Commission (including Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions), the Leverhulme Trust, the British Council, the Royal Society Te Apārangi, the Chinese International Centre for Collaborative Research on Disaster Risk Reduction (ICCR-DRR), the China Scholarship Council (CSC), the (Mexican) Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), the World Bank and its Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), the Motorola Solutions Foundation, the WTW Research Network and Howden Re, among others.
I strive to create a lab that welcomes, supports, values, and includes people of diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives! [OUR VALUES]
WHAT'S NEW
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellows Lawrence Tseng, Seungjun Lee and Zhengying He, and PhD students Alex Parsons, Juan Diego Vargas Mendoza, Oscar Higuera Roa and Vladimir Ramos
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellows Lawrence Tseng, Seungjun Lee and Zhengying He, and PhD students Alex Parsons, Juan Diego Vargas Mendoza, Oscar Higuera Roa and Vladimir Ramos
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September 30 – October 2, 2026: Fabrizio Ascione (University of Naples Federico II; former visiting PhD student in our group) presented our paper ‘From demolition to reuse: a decision-oriented perspective on reclaimed structural steel’ (F. Ascione, C. Galasso, E. Mele) at the XXX Congresso del Collegio dei Tecnici dell’Acciaio (CTA 2026) in Rome, Italy, winning the Best Paper Award. Congratulations, Fabrizio!
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October 2026: A warm welcome to our new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellows Zhengying He, Seungjun Lee and Lawrence Tseng, and to our new PhD students Oscar Higuera Roa (UCL Research Excellence Scholarship), Alex Parsons (UCL EPSRC Landscape Award with Howden Re), and Juan Diego Vargas Mendoza and Vladimir Ramos (joint IUSS Pavia–UCL PhD, IUSS Pavia Scholarships)! Meet them on our Team page.
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September 14–18, 2026: Several members of the research group attended and presented their research at the 18th European Conference on Earthquake Engineering (18ECEE), held in Berlin, Germany. Details associated with those presentations are available on the Research Outputs > Conference Proceedings/Abstracts page. Many congratulations to Onur Ülkü, Chenbo Wang and Pouria Kourehpaz on receiving the Young Researchers Award 2026 of the European Association for Earthquake Engineering (EAEE) for their papers!
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July 13–17, 2026: A strong DE|RISC Lab contingent (Gemma Cremen, Chenbo Wang, Preetish Kakoty, Roberto Merino Vela, Karim Aljawhari, Onur Ülkü, Cristina Cordova Arias, Pouria Kourehpaz, Diego Valdivieso, Vladimir Ramos and Nicole Paul) attended the 13th U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering (13NCEE), hosted by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) in Portland, Oregon, USA, presenting over 15 papers and chairing several sessions. Details associated with those presentations are available on the Research Outputs > Conference Proceedings/Abstracts page. Carmine Galasso co-led the Risk and Loss Modelling stream of the Technical Programme Committee with Ehsan Kianirad (Liberty Mutual Insurance) and joined EERI’s Meet the Leaders event. Congratulations to Onur Ülkü on receiving a Vilas and Ingrid Mujumdar Early Career 13NCEE Participation Grant, and to Cristina Cordova Arias (EERI 2025 Younger Member Award) and Nicole Paul (EERI 2025 Shah Family Innovation Prize) on their awards!
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July 8, 2026: Carmine Galasso gave an invited talk on ‘Dynamic Exposure Modelling for Human-centred Urban Disaster Mitigation’ at the Second Annual Meeting of the People-Centred Tsunami Early Warning for the Indian Coastlines (PCTWIN) project, UCL, London, UK.
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June 29 – July 1, 2026: Carmine Galasso spoke at the Elsevier roundtable ‘From Climate Science to Disaster Action’ at the 2026 Exeter Climate Forum, alongside leaders from the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG), AXA and the University of Exeter, also drawing on his role as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.
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June 23–25, 2026: Our group contributed to the GEM Foundation Conference 2026: From Faults to Future Scenarios in Zagreb, Croatia: Carmine Galasso gave an invited talk on ‘Forward-looking Exposure Modelling for Human-centred Urban Disaster Mitigation’; Nicole Paul presented ‘Predicting population displacement due to earthquakes globally’; Karim Aljawhari presented ‘Vulnerability modelling for embodied carbon’ (see our Nature Communications paper); and Preetish Kakoty presented ‘Toward Enhanced Portfolio Seismic Risk Estimates via Physics-Based Ground Motion Simulations’.
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May 23, 2026: Carmine Galasso gave a keynote lecture on ‘Dynamic Natural Hazard Risk Modelling for Human-centred Urban Disaster Mitigation’ at the Workshop on Fragility and Marginality of Territories, Destinations, and Cities: Risk Assessment, Smart Monitoring, and Economic Impact, held as part of the FraMMET project at the University of Naples Parthenope, Naples, Italy.
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May 18–19, 2026: Carmine Galasso co-chaired, with Fatemeh Jalayer (UCL) and James Dalziel (WTW), the First RIAGE — (Re)Insurance–Academia Global Earthquake Workshop at UCL, bringing together researchers, engineers, policymakers and (re)insurance professionals to push earthquake risk science into practice.
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May 4–8, 2026: Carmine Galasso taught the 12-hour module ‘Probabilistic Risk and Catastrophe Modelling’ in the excellence PhD course Advances in Modelling, Analysis and Risk Assessment of Structure and Infrastructure, organised by the PhD Programme in Advances in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Palermo, Italy, under the University’s CoRi programme, alongside Prof Humberto Varum (University of Porto), Prof Enrico Spacone (University of Chieti-Pescara) and Dr Marco Amato (Czech Technical University in Prague).
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April 29, 2026: Carmine Galasso gave an invited lecture on ‘Dynamic Multi-Hazard Risk Modelling for Human-centred Urban Disaster Mitigation’ at the NEXT-GEN Spring School: Tackling Climate Change and Natural Hazard Risk for Next-Generation Communities, Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia, Pavia, Italy.
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April 10, 2026: Carmine Galasso gave a keynote lecture on ‘Dynamic Natural Hazard Risk Modelling for Human-centred Urban Disaster Mitigation’ at the International Conference and Workshop ‘Proof of Concept Approaches: Methods, Models and Strategies for Urban Risk Mitigation’, Department of Architecture (DiARC), University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
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March 12–14, 2026: Carmine Galasso was a panellist on ‘Creating a Roadmap for Just, Resilient, and Sustainable Cities’, alongside Francesco Pomponi (University of York) and Vivian Loftness (Carnegie Mellon University), hosted by Ming Hu and moderated by Tracy Kijewski-Correa (University of Notre Dame), at the summit ‘Sustainability of Hope: Envisioning a New Horizon for Planetary Flourishing’ at Notre Dame Rome, Italy. The week also saw the launch of the Just Transformations to Sustainability Initiative and the inaugural convening of the Global Alliance for Laudato si’.
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January 31, 2026: Carmine Galasso and Professor Brendon Bradley (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) were awarded a Royal Society Te Apārangi Catalyst: Seeding grant for the two-year project ‘Next-generation seismic risk analysis using New Zealand as a natural laboratory’. Building on New Zealand’s rich data from the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence and the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, the project will combine AI-enhanced exposure models from satellite and street-level imagery, AI-based surrogate models for fragility and vulnerability functions, and reduced-order earthquake cycle simulators for time-dependent catastrophe modelling.
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December 12, 2025: Many congratulations to Nicole Paul and Chenbo Wang, who both passed their PhD vivas on the same day, just three years and three months after starting! Nicole’s thesis, ‘Household displacement and return in disasters’, was co-supervised by Carmine Galasso, Jack Baker (Stanford University) and Vitor Silva (GEM Foundation), with support from a UCL Overseas Research Studentship and the WTW Research Network; Chenbo’s thesis, ‘Data-driven, stakeholder-oriented and human-centred disaster impact modelling for equitable decision-making related to natural hazards’, was co-supervised by Gemma Cremen and Carmine Galasso, with support from a UCL Overseas Research Studentship and UCL CEGE. Many thanks to the examiners: Bozidar Stojadinovic (ETH Zurich), Rodrigo Costa (University of Waterloo), Fatemeh Jalayer (UCL) and Tim Hillel (UCL).
MAIN RESEARCH AREAS
Multi-Hazard Catastrophe Risk Modelling
Performance-based Engineering and Structural Reliability
Disaster Recovery and Community Resilience
Risk-informed Decision-Making
MAIN SPONSORS
