(Not so) natural disasters: Challenges and Opportunities for science

Monday, October 24, 2016
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Speaker: 
  • Jenny Suckale

Abstract: The term "natural disasters" diminishes the key role that the human context plays in turning a natural event into a disaster. In this talk, I present scientific insights into the physical processes governing the onset and evolution of extreme events and discuss how this improved understanding the challenges and opportunities that these present for decision-makers and communities at risk. More specifically, I will focus on three disasters of special current relevance, ice-sheet disintegration, coastal risk and injection-induced seismicity. The common denominator of what at first glance might seem like disparate systems is multiphase flow. The dynamic interactions between multiple solid and fluid phases, such as ice and melt-water; vegetation and waves; rocks and wastewater; give rise to drastic nonlinearities that govern abrupt changes in system behavior reflected in extreme events.

About the Speaker: Before joining Stanford in January 2014, Suckale held a position as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and as a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard. She has a PhD in Geophysics from MIT and a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining graduate school, Suckale worked as a scientific consultant for different international organizations aiming to reduce the impact of natural and environmental disasters in vulnerable communities. This experience motivates her research aimed at reducing disaster risk by advancing our understanding of the physical processes that give rise to the dramatic nonlinearities expressed in extreme events. For many natural systems, these nonlinearities result from the dynamic interactions between solid, fluid and gas phases. Suckale improves our fundamental understanding and predictive capabilities of these complex multi-phase flows by developing original computational methods customized for the problem at hand. The phenomena she explores range from the microscopic to the planetary scale and space a wide variety of geophysics systems such as volcanoes, glaciers, tsunamis and magma oceans.