Assistant Professor
Environmental Risk Management and Spatial Planning
Education
- Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (Principal Investigator), Brunel University of London (16/09/2024 – 15/09/2026): FIREWISE, "Proactive wildfire resilience assessment and management" (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01-01). Proposal score 94/100.
- Postdoctoral research, University of Thessaly (01/12/2017 – 30/11/2020): Stavros Niarchos Foundation fellowship. Topic: exposure and effect analysis of natural disasters within an integrated risk assessment framework, applied to forest fires.
- PhD in Natural Hazards Prevention and Management, University of Thessaly (2012 – 2016): a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) for the prevention and management of natural disasters, with forest fires in Thasos as the case study. Prof. Mike Flannigan (University of Alberta) served on the committee.
- PhD-related research stay, University of Alberta (05/2014 – 11/2014): State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) short-term scholarship; wildfire simulation modelling and management.
- MSc in Geospatial Technologies (Erasmus Mundus joint degree) (2016 – 2018): NOVA IMS (Lisbon), WWU Münster and UJI Castellón. Grade 16/20.
- MSc in Spatial Planning & Development – Spatial Planning & Regional Policy (2008 – 2010), University of Thessaly: grade 8.94/10.
- Integrated Master's in Engineering of Planning and Regional Development (2002 – 2008), University of Thessaly: grade 7.89/10.
- Seminars and summer schools:
- Bushfires: Response, Relief, and Resilience (University of Newcastle Australia, UNITAR, CIFAL; completed 26/10/2024)
- Ecological Data Analysis in R, ecodar2015 (University of the Aegean, 4 ECTS)
- Seminar on writing HORIZON 2020 research proposals
Research interests
- Wildfires:
- Fire modelling and simulation (Burn-P3, Prometheus, Cell2Fire, FireSTARR)
- Hazard and risk assessment
- Detection, including watchtower location planning
- Location planning of firefighting resources and initial attack
- Wildland–urban interface (WUI) resilience
- Natural disasters and environmental hazards: risk management frameworks, early warning systems, floods, drought, heatwaves and evacuation route planning.
- Spatial resilience and spatial planning: infrastructure and community resilience, fire-adaptive spatial planning, climate change adaptation and maritime spatial planning.
- Geospatial technologies: GIS and QGIS, remote sensing, spatial decision support systems (SDSS/DSS), satellite data fusion and AI for wildfire prediction (R, Python, WindNinja).
- Drought, climate change and agriculture:
- Spatiotemporal analysis of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and drought projections
- Agroclimatic classification
- Evapotranspiration and crop water requirements
- Agrometeorology
- Forest ecology and natural resource management: forest road networks, land use and land cover change, biodiversity and ecosystems.
Environmental education and sustainability: education for disaster risk reduction, with many supervised theses.
