We’re pleased to introduce Dr. Ganesh Dhungana, who joined the DRRN this Fall as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with DRRN faculty members Carlos Molina Hutt and Kees Lokman. Through a brief Q&A, he shares insights into his current research, his work within the DRRN community, and the ideas that motivate his approach to disaster and resilience research. We’re excited to welcome him to the network and to spotlight the expertise he brings to our collaborative efforts.
Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your academic and professional background?
I earned my PhD in Disaster Management from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. Before joining UBC, I served as project lead for a program on resilient communities at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Harvard University. Basically, my research focuses on disaster management, social vulnerability, indigenous knowledge, and sustainability frameworks that shape disaster governance and resilience building.
Could you tell us a bit about your current postdoctoral research project with Prof. Carlos Molina Hutt and Prof. Kees Lokman? What inspired you to join the DRRN and this project?
My postdoctoral project with Prof. Carlos and Prof. Kees looks at how we can better understand the value of investing in mitigation. In British Columbia, communities face many overlapping hazards, including floods, earthquakes, landslides, and others, so our project focuses on understanding the best methods for evaluating the economic, social, and environmental benefits of reducing these risks. Though a lot of existing approaches focus mainly on direct economic losses, part of my work is to look at frameworks that also capture things like community resilience, long-term stability, and environmental benefits. We are trying to support government agencies to make more informed and evidence-based decisions about where to invest in mitigation and how to get the most benefit for the public. Talking about my inspiration for joining DRRN and this project, is the chance to work with a dynamic group of people, and also to contribute to something like developing a framework and a user-friendly tool that would be beneficial to government agencies to calculate the return on mitigation investment. And the luckiest thing is that working with Carlos and Kees, who bring different but complementary perspectives, makes the project genuinely collaborative and exciting as well as a learning experience for me.
Looking ahead, how do you hope that other disaster researchers, policymakers, and practitioners will be able to draw on or apply your work in BC?
Looking ahead, I hope this work becomes helpful to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in BC. For policymakers, we hope our research will help them calculate returns on investment by adopting a framework we are developing that will also consider long-term community resilience and environmental benefits, which are often harder to quantify. And for other researchers, I hope our findings will help bridge the gap between technical analysis and practical application.
Anything else that you would like to share with network members?
I would just add that I am really excited to be part of this family. Within a short span of time, I have understood the strength of DRRN in its diversity of people, so I am more excited to learn from others. And, if anyone is working on related topics like ours or just wants to connect, I would be happy to talk further.