Contacts
david.alexander@ucl.ac.uk
David E. Alexander
David E. Alexander
University College London (UCL)
David E. Alexander is Professor of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London (UCL). He graduated in geography at the London School of Economics and obtained his PhD in Mediterranean geomorphology from UCL. During a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UCL he studied erosion processes in clay badlands. From 1982 until 2002 he taught geomorphology, physical geography, natural hazards and disaster studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA). He has participated widely in emergency management training courses and for 2003-7 was Scientific Director of the AdvancedSchool of Civil Protection of the regional government of Lombardy in Italy. As a Professor the University of Florence (2005-11) he was a leading member of the team that designed, launched and taught Italy’s first Master of Civil Protection course. Alexander is Visiting Professor at the Universities of Bournemouth and Northumbria in the UK, Affiliated Professor at the University of Lund in Sweden and an affiliate of the Global Risk Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Alexander’s published journal articles, reports and working papers include studies of seismic landslides, post-earthquake urban planning problems, logistical aspects of emergencies, the sociology of panic, the theory of disasters and earthquake injury epidemiology. His book Natural Disasters was published in London and New York in 1993 and has been reprinted on many occasions. His subsequent books on the subject include Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters (2000), Principles of Emergency Planning and Management (2002), Recovery from Disaster (with Ian Davis, 2015) and How to Write an Emergency Plan (2016).
David Alexander has served on public resilience forums and worked with commercial companies in insurance and telecommunications. He has worked with the Council of Europe on disaster risk reduction for people with disabilities. In the period 2008-11 he directed a major European project that brought vulnerability assessment and reduction measures to stakeholders in the public and private sectors in Europe. He has advised the governments of Italy and the United Arab Emirates on disaster mitigation measures.
David Alexander is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and was formerly Co-Editor of Disasters journal. He is also a member of the Editorial Boards of 16 other scientific journals. From 1985 until 2001 he was Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Management and for some years also of the associated book series. He was co-editor and principal author of the Encyclopaedia of Environmental Science (Springer, 1999). In 2013 he won the Distinguished Research Award of the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM).
David Alexander is a British and Italian citizen and is resident in London and Tuscany.