Awards for PhD students in the Natural Hazards team

Two PhD students supervised by the Natural Hazards team on behalf of the EDF R&D France project CAMEA, have won awards for their achievements and contributions to resilience to multi-hazards and climate change. Recognitions like these strengthen our links with academia and research organisations and promote excellence in nuclear.

Former PhD student Aloïs Tilloy (supervised by Hugo Winter and Amelie Joly (EDF UK R&D) and Bruce Malamud at King's College London), was awarded the Prix CCR Cat Nat 2022. CCR is a French public reinsurance group and international reinsurer. Aloïs received the award for his PhD thesis “Understanding and modelling extreme multi-hazard events”. The " multi-hazard " field has gained much interest since 2017 in diverse sectors including energy and insurance. Alois’s thesis was selected for its clarity and its acute description of multiple hazards interrelations. It also proposed methods to identify and assess the frequency of multi-hazard or compound-hazard events.

Current PhD student Eleanor D’Arcy supervised by Dafni Sifnioti (EDF R&D UK) and Jonathan Tawn (Lancaster University) won the Smith Institute TakeAIM 2023 award for her thesis “Accounting for Seasonality in Extreme Sea Level Estimation”. The Smith Institute is an independent company primarily focused on Industrial Mathematics and System Engineering.

Eleanor’s work was selected from over 40 entries and presents a new method of estimating extreme sea levels that is the first to capture seasonality, interannual variations and longer-term changes. Reliable estimates of sea level return levels are crucial for coastal flooding risk assessments and coastal flood defence design.