Thea Aldrich: Thea Aldrich is a consultant specializing in open source community development, open data and multi-stakeholder disaster preparedness, response and resilience initiative management. She has extensive experience assisting organizations successfully navigate the journey from hackathon to deployment ready application. The has served as the Community Manager of Random Hacks of Kindness, mentor for the Intel Innovation Pipeline, Board Member of the OpenStreetMap United States Foundation, Standby Task Force member and various other HFoSS projects.
Naomi Alesworth: Focused on risk perception, coastal communities, water security, climate change and disaster risk reduction, Naomi has worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Kosovo and in Pakistan and with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) in Pakistan. She has an MSc in Disasters, Adaptation and Development from King’s College London and a BA (Hons) in International Development and Sociology from Northampton University, and a strong interest in Technology for Development.
Yewondowossen Assefa: Mr. Yewondwossen Assefa is a technical consultant at the the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery's Open Data for Resilience Initiative at the World Bank. As a software developer, he is involved in several GIS related open source projects such as InaSAFE (inasafe.org) and MapServer (mapserver.org). He is also a charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (osgeo.org).
Dr. Lee Bosher: Dr Lee Bosher is a Senior Lecturer in the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) at Loughborough University, England. He has a background in disaster risk management and his research and teaching includes disaster risk reduction and the multi-disciplinary integration of proactive hazard mitigation strategies into the decision-making processes of key stakeholders, involved with the planning, design, construction and operation of the built environment. Lee is coordinator of the International Council for Building's (CIB) Working Commission W120 on ‘Disasters and the Built Environment’ and he is currently involved in research projects that are investigating how urban resilience can be increased in the UK, India, Haiti, and across Europe. Lee’s books include ‘Hazards and the Built Environment’ (2008) and ‘Social and Institutional Elements of Disaster Vulnerability’ (2007).
Kate Chapman: Kate Chapman is the Executive Director at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team(HOT). HOT believes that freely available, up-to-date geographic data can be vital in responding to a disaster. They help communities and responders to utilize the OpenStreetMap data, and encourage them to contribute and update the data. Over the past two years Kate has been primarily based in Indonesia where she has lead the AustralianAid funded HOT program.
Kuang Chen: Kuang Chen is the founder CEO of Captricity. The idea for Captricity came from Kuang’s dissertation research in east Africa, where he built tools to transform data from paper to structured, machine-readable data. His work focuses on data-centric approaches to increase the efficiency of low-resource organizations. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Ernani Celzo: Ernani Celzo is the Communications Ministry Coordinator of the Baguio Episcopal Area-Philippine Central Conference of The United Methodist Church. His works are innovative and creative approaches to church ministries like Change The World events, radio ministry, and technology-based (ICT) ministries including website and database management. He is also involved in the communications relief in the Yolanda-stricken areas of Leyte providing wireless link connections to various relief organizations. In his spare time, he does graphics design and multimedia presentations. He also teaches kids on basic drawing and sketching at a local private school. His passion for natural farming creates a new trend in his small island community. "
Tina Comes: Tina Comes is Associate Professor at the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management at the Department of ICT, University of Agder, Norway. She studied Mathematics, literature and philosophy. After receiving her Ph.D. on distributed scenario-based multi-criteria decision support from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), she was head of a research group on Risk Management. At KIT, she led the socio-economic impact assessment of the CeDIM and the Risk Management Group of the Supply Chain Lab, to which she is still affiliated. Tina’s research aims at providing support to decision makers confronted with complex and highly uncertain situations. She focuses on designing systems for collaborative decision support that aim at improving the communication between experts, decision makers and users. Her research areas include disaster risk management, humanitarian logistics, and decision analysis.
Trishan R. de Lanerolle: Trishan de Lanerolle is a technologist with over a decade of experience, having led the development efforts of several open source software applications for disaster management and humanitarian response from a web-based coordination tool for a social service organization in New York City to a mobile application, utilized by an International NGO, to manage a food distribution program in Rural Haiti. Mr. De Lanerolle has worked on projects for organizations including ACDIVOCA, IBM and the World Bank. He is co-founder and director of the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Project (HFOSS) at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, CTO of Nile Point Consulting LLC and serves on the board of advisors for the Non-Profit FOSS Institute. He has a BS in Computer Science from Trinity College, and a MS in Management of Innovation and Technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
Mark Iliffe: Mark Iliffe is a cartographer who maps formal and informal environments around the world. He works on how understanding representations of space and place can transform and dictate movement, policy and thinking.
Priyanka Pathak: Priyanka Pathak brings to the Code for Resilience team an significant amount of experience in ICTs in health and education, having spent several years designing, customizing, and implementing tools across South Asia and Africa. Currently, Priyanka works as a designer at Little Cloud Collective, a design collective focused on technology and social good, as well as a World Bank consultant in the ICT and Innovation unit. Priyanka's academic background in business, information systems, informatics, and computer science as well as her extensive field experience will make her useful to teams looking for assistance with the design aspect of their tools - visual, experience, and systematic - as well as with implementation, scale, and thinking through business models.
Keiko Saito: Keiko Saito is a Disaster Risk Management (DRM) Specialist with the GFDRR Labs team. She specializes in the application of geospatial data for disaster risk management. Her interest is in bringing in the geospatial dimension into disaster risk management for all stages of the disaster cycle, from preparedness through to recovery and reconstruction.
Jorge Sanz: I'm Jorge, from Valencia, Spain. I work at Prodevelop as a Geospatial Consultant where I help my colleagues to build great geographical applications and systems. I studied Surveying first, and afterwards Cartography and Geodesy, so my background is highly focused on Earth sciences, but as I love computers and programming, I ended up working with Geographical Information Systems. I work for web and desktop systems doing a little bit of everything: developing on HTML/JS/Java/Python/etc, doing some system administration, documenting, training, helping on bids, whatever.I'm a truly supporter of free software and culture so I try to develop all my professional activities on that arena, volunteering at the OSGeo Foundation at any level, helping to manage some foundation systems, supporting the OSGeo Spanish Language Local Chapter and promoting at local level at our Geoinquietos group.
Tanzim Saqib: Tanzim is the mastermind behind Windows Phone app revolution in Bangladesh, making Microsoft the most dominant player in the local apps market. Prior to joining Microsoft, he served British Telecom as Technical Architect.
Dr. Jason von Meding: Dr. Jason von Meding is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and was previously a Lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, UK. His research background includes a honed expertise in decision-making processes and predictive tools for modelling human behaviour and environments, as well as the assessment of building performance in extreme conditions. He has researched extensively in the humanitarian sector and within developing country contexts, supervising several current doctoral projects in disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction. He has been awarded over $1 million in research funding in the past 12 months (in the UK) and has published widely in the areas of disasters in the built environment and more mainstream construction and project management. He acts as a peer reviewer for numerous academic journals and is involved in several international research networks.