We are delighted to announce Dr Kristina Wolf as the winner of the 2024 EuroSDR PhD Award. 

Geospatial data infrastructure for multi-agency incident management

Kristina Wolf is working as a Research Associate with the School of Engineering at Newcastle University (UK) for the National Hub for Decarbonised, Adaptable, and Resilient Transport Infrastructure (DARe), and worked previously for the Water Security and Sustainable Development Hub. Kristina obtained an MRes degree in Geospatial Data Science and an M. Sc. in Management Information Systems.

She has a deep enthusiasm for public safety and disaster risk management, which stems from her research at Tohoku University in Japan. When she experienced first-hand the importance of community resilience during natural hazards, she decided to use her passion for Information Technology and GIScience to better understand the world around us and help prepare for and respond to adverse weather events.

Her PhD "Geospatial data infrastructure for multi-agency incident management" was funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation's (UKRI) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Geospatial Systems and Ordnance Survey, the National Mapping Agency of Great Britain.

Adapting a systems engineering design, she has built a strong network of industry partners and international collaborators, including emergency services and local authorities, to identify stakeholder needs, analyse requirements, and design and develop an incident response system prototype. Feedback from stakeholders in the UK and international members during a placement at the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at The Ohio State University helped evaluate the geospatial data infrastructure.

Her research contributes to the knowledge of location-based data required to support multi-agencies involved in incident management and design a data ontology linking datasets from different traditional domains. The geospatial prototype demonstrates how integrating real-time weather, traffic, flooding, and incident data can assist multi-agencies in operational response, flood impact assessment and image analysis.

Dr Kristina Wolf PhD Award Winner info

More information:

Kristina’s Newcastle profile: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/engineering/staff/profile/kristinawolf.html 

Kristina’s website: https://wolfgeo.solutions/

Dr Wolf will join us at our upcoming Board of Delegates meeting in Copenhagen to present her research to our Members.