DESCRIPTION OF THE LEGAL ENTITY AND ITS MAIN TASKS
Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) has been a leading international centre for research and consulting within geosciences for over 60 years. NGI is a private foundation with office and laboratory in Oslo, branch office in Trondheim and daughter companies in Houston, Texas, and Perth, Australia. NGI has 230 employees and hosts a number of PhD candidates, Postdocs and research scientists every year. NGI holds an international key position for the warning, detection, and analysis of natural hazards as well as for the assessment, prevention and mitigation of geohazards such as slope stability assessment in soils and rocks, slide prevention, snow avalanche and tsunami research, flood control and dam engineering. One of the strong sides of NGI is the combination of theory, model testing, monitoring in real design projects. NGI offers a competitive environment in which hosted researchers have the opportunity to exchange with practicing engineers working on challenging design projects in which they implement state-of-the-art methodologies and for which they often need to innovate in order to respond to their particular needs.
Specific international project involvement include studying the effects of extreme precipitation and other climatic factors on the hazard and risk associated with slides and avalanches both on a global scale (Global Natural Disaster Hotspots project, which was financed by the World Bank and ProVention consortium) and on a sub-national scale (including for Indonesia in the UN Global Assessment Report, 2011).
CV OF THE PERSONS
Ms Unni Eidsvig (Male) is senior adviser in the Risk, slope stability and climate adaptation department. She has broad experience in risk and vulnerability assessment and risk management within natural hazards and geotechnics. She has experience as project manager of several R&D projects and is currently project manager of an internal strategic project on risk management of natural hazards. Ms. Eidsvig has also been involved in more national and international quantitative risk assessment consultancy projects. She has been coordinator of NGI activities including work package leadership in the EU-FP 7 projects INTACT: Impact of extreme weather on critical infrastructure – Capability Project, www.intact-project.eu and SENSUM: Framework to integrate Space-based and in-situ sENSing for dynamic vUlnerability and recovery Monitoring, www.sensum-project.eu. She has given lectures related to risk assessment and risk management and at the Norwegian Technical University NTNU and at the University in Vienna. Ms Eidsvig contributed to the subchapter: The most recent view of vulnerability in the The DRMKC report Science for disaster risk management 2017: knowing better and losing less She has authored/co-authored more than 15 articles. | |
Dr Regula Frauenfelder (Female) is the technical lead for remote sensing and GIS at NGI. She has a PhD degree in physical geography with special focus on remote sensing, geo-informatics, natural hazards and climate change. Through her earlier positions, Dr Frauenfelder gained a strong background in cryospheric and paleoclimatic sciences. Dr Frauenfelder has over 15 years of experience as a project manager of both R&D projects and consultancy projects, as well as with the preparation of scopes of work and tenders. She was one of two main responsible to successfully establish the Interferometric SAR method at NGI. Applied techniques include Differential-InSAR, SBAS (Small Baseline) algorithm and Permanent Scatterers. Dr Frauenfelder has received several academic distinctions. In 2007, Dr Frauenfelder was nominated to compete for two full professorship positions at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her major fields of work and experience relate to: spatial natural hazard analysis (hot-spot analyses as well as site-specific), ground deformation analyses (photogrammetry, InSAR, InRAR), impact analysis of climate change, project leadership, supervising PhD and MSc students, external reviewing of PhD candidates, peer-reviewing for scientific journals and National Science Foundations. Dr. Frauenfelder was project leader for several of NGI's earth observation projects for the European Space Agency. She was also project leader for the project InfraRisk ("Impacts of extreme weather events on infrastructure in Norway"; 2010-2013) funded by the Research Council of Norway, the Norwegian National Rail Administration and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. | |
Dr. Farrokh Nadim (Male) is Technical Director at NGI, with expertise in risk and hazard assessment for geohazards. His research and consulting focus on hazard and risk issues in geotechnical engineering, with special focus on geohazards and their risks to the society. From 2003 to 2012 Dr Nadim was the director of the International Centre for Geohazards (ICG), one of the first Norwegian Centre of Excellence established by the Research Council of Norway. Until recently, he was also an adjunct professor at University of Oslo and the Norwegian Technical University NTNU. Dr Nadim has authored/co-authored more than 230 articles and been invited lecturer at a number of international events and courses. He received his MSc and ScD in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is involved in a number of national and international quantitative risk assessment projects in Brazil, Norway, Canada, Romania and Poland. Dr Nadim is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) (2009-2011). He was the scientific coordinator of the large-scale FP7 project SafeLand, and coordinator of NGI activities in EU-projects 'LESSLOSS – Risk Mitigation for Earthquakes and Landslides, www.lessloss.org/' in FP6, and 'MOVE – Methods for improvement of vulnerability assessment in Europe www.move-fp7.eu' and 'MATRIX – New Multi-HAzard and MulTi-RIsK Assessment MethodS for Europe' in FP7. He was project manager of the World Bank and ProVention consortium 'Global Hotspots in Landslide Hazard and Risk' within the 'Natural Disaster Hotspots' project (2002-2005) and 'Risk Assessment and Mitigation Measures for Natural and Conflict Related Hazards in Asia-Pacific', commissioned by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok (2007-2009). | |
Dr. Luca Piciullo (Male) is senior researcher and project engineer in
the Section of the Natural Hazards at NGI. Piciullo's PhD thesis at the
University of Salerno (UNISA) was focused on Landslide Early Warning Systems
(LEWS) and the definition of an original method (called EDuMaP) for the
performance evaluation of such systems. Piciullo has also completed post-doc
research positions at UNISA, and the University of Milano-Bicocca. His research
at NGI is focused on early warning systems, rainfall thresholds for the
triggering of landslides, risk assessment and stability of tailings dams. He is
main convener of the session “Towards reliable Landslide Early Warning Systems
(LEWS)” at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) since 2017. He is currently PM
of a 4-year research project on "Sustainable mine tailings" (ca. 1 M
euro) dealing with lab test analyses, innovative monitoring, numerical
modelling, acid mine drainage analyses and risk assessment of tailings dams. He
has supervised several postdoc, PhD and MS students.
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