Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva has been recently appointed as an Assistant Professor Tenure Track in Geomorphology and Natural Hazards in August 2023. Virginia is a fluvial geomorphologist, and she has worked extensively on analyzing natural hazards and cascade processes in mountain areas, emphasizing flood dynamics, hillslope-channel coupling, and the feedback and interactions between flow-sediment-vegetation. Before joining GIUB, Virginia was part of the Geosciences and Environment Faculty at the University of Lausanne as a SNSF Eccellenza Professor, where she still has part of her team. In her work, Virginia combines a field approach with remote sensing, and numerical modelling. Her work aims at developing new methods for monitoring and modeling fluvial processes, helping design effective management strategies, and informing sustainable environmental policies.
Christine Eriksen is heading up a new Geographies of Disasters group at GIUB as part of her SNSF Consolidator Grant, “Building Wildfire Resilient Communities in Europe (FiRES)”. A human geographer by training, Christine worked at the University of Wollongong, Australia and the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich before joining GIUB in August 2023. Her widely published and award-winning research has for the past two decades examined how people’s capacity to cope with wildfires are shaped by local knowledge, cultural norms, political agendas, land use and climatic changes.
