Research Team
Our main research team consists of Earth Scientists and Rock Physicists working at University College London and the University of Portsmouth.
Principal Investigator, UCL
Christopher Kilburn is Professor of Volcanology in the Department of Earth Sciences at UCL and Director of the UCL Hazard Centre. He has more than 30 years of experience of international research on volcanoes and landslides, with positions in Italy (INGV-Vesuvius Observatory, University of Naples and University of Ferrara), Austria (University of Vienna) and the USA (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory). In 2017, he launched WAVE:SPICE (Warnings and Alerts during Volcanic Eruptions: Scientific Practice Informed by Community Experience), a community-based network in Campi Flegrei on communicating warnings of volcanic hazards (https://bradisismoflegreo.wordpress.com/18-wavespice-cov10/). Project ESCAPE is the latest UK contribution to the network.
Co-Investigator, UoP
Carmen Solana is Associate Professor of Volcanology and Risk Communication at the School of the Environment and Life Sciences in the University of Portsmouth. She is the director of the MSc in Crisis and Disaster Management, leads the Hazards, Risk and Resilience Research and Innovation group and heads the rock mechanics laboratory at Portsmouth University and is also a research associate of the Volcanological Institute of Canaries. Her research encompasses both hazard assessment and mitigation and risk perception and communication. She has mainly worked in Spain (Canary Islands), Italy (Etna and Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei), the Caribbean (Montserrat and Dominica) and the UK (Portsmouth and the South coast).
Co-Investigator, LMU München & UCL
Philip Benson is a Geophysicist with 20 years of research experience in rock physics, rock mechanics and geophysics in Germany (LMU Munich), the UK (University of Portsmouth and UCL), Canada (University of Toronto and McGill University) and Switzerland (ETH Zurich). His research interests focus on laboratory rock-physics investigations of brittle fracture and scaling these to understand crustal processes, notably volcano seismicity and the slope stability of volcanoes.
Post-Doctoral Research, UoP
Matias is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Portsmouth, working with rock deformation experiments. He completed his PhD in volcano-tectonics at the P. Universidad Católica de Chile researching the stresses and deformations resulting from magma emplacement in a cordilleran crust using numerical and analogue models. He is interested in volcano monitoring, volcanic disaster risk management, scientific outreach and geoheritage.
Post-Doctoral Research, UCL
Eric is a post-doctoral researcher in the UCL Hazard Centre. He is investigating the physical processes that control the approach to eruption at volcanoes that have been silent for generations, by relating patterns of precursory signals of an eruption, such as seismicity and ground deformation, to processes for creating new pathways for magma ascent. He is also interested in the fluid dynamics of volcanic eruptions, in particular the interaction of turbulent ash clouds, that form during the explosive eruption of subaerial and submarine volcanoes, with the ambient environment.
