Each year, in conjunction with the Annual Natural Hazards Workshop, the Natural Hazards Center and its partners have the opportunity to recognize some of the stellar work being done by hazards and disasters scholars and practitioners. Read below to learn more about this year’s winners, who were chosen from a wide range of deserving applicants.
The Mary Fran Myers Scholarship
Each year, the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship—named in honor of the late Natural Hazards Center co-director—recognizes outstanding individuals who share Myers passion for disaster loss reduction nationally and internationally.
The scholarship provides financial support to recipients who otherwise would be unable to attend and participate in the annual Workshop to further their research or community work and careers.
The Mary Fran Myers Scholarship selection committee chose three recipients to receive the 2019 Scholarship:
Homolota Borah: Borah is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India and has served as an assistant professor at Kamala Nehru College in University of Delhi for the past two years. Borah’s research is focused on Majuli—the world’s largest inhabited river island—in northeast India. She is currently working to identify strategies for improving the resilience of livelihood systems, exploring tangible and intangible cultural heritage in community resilience, and developing synergies between community organizations and local government.
Shaila Shahid: Shahid is the senior advisor for climate change, disaster risk reduction, and gender with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development and an environmental lawyer. She serves as a World Wildlife Fund fellow with experience in disaster risk reduction, integrated water resources management, climate change adaptation and building community resilience. She is involved in a number of global and national policy development processes, such as the Disaster Management Act, Water Act, Gender and Equity Strategy, and the Risk Reduction Action Plan for Climate Change.
Lalrinpuii Tlau: Tlau is a mitigation officer at GeoHazards International, where she supports a comprehensive approach to reduce extreme earthquake and landslide risk in the fast-growing city of Aizawl, Mizoram in northeast India. In 2014—in partnership with the GeoHazards International team and local professionals—Tlau developed a scenario of a plausible earthquake with specific consequences, titled, “Effects of a Magnitude 7 Earthquake on Aizawl, Mizoram and Recommendations to Reduce Losses.” She works closely with the Government of Mizoram and the Aizawl Municipal Corporation as they implement site development regulations and plans to reduce landslide and seismic danger.
Read the winners' full bios and learn more about past winners on the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship Winners page.
The Mary Fran Myers Award
The Mary Fran Myers Award was established in 2002 to recognize disaster professionals who continue Myers’ goal of promoting research on gender issues, disasters, emergency management, and higher education. The Gender and Disaster Network have named Bernadette Resurrección as the 2019 Mary Fran Myers Award winner.
Bernadette Resurrección: Resurrección has researched gender issues in contexts of environmental change for more than 20 years. In 1995, she explored deforestation and upland rice agriculture in Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Her research showed the dynamics of gender and forest resource politics as indigenous women and men transitioned from traditional swidden (slash and burn) farming systems to begin farming hybrid rice varieties in fragile environments already degraded by logging, erosion, and frequent landslides. Her insights paved the way to further research in the Mekong Region on changing gender subjectivities, livelihood practices, and power relations.
Resurrección took up teaching in gender and development studies at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Thailand after completing her doctoral studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands. During her 13 years at AIT, Resurrección designed cutting-edge courses on gender, environment, and natural resource management. Her teaching modules on gender, climate change and disasters as well as mentoring doctoral and master’s students on these topics has supported the growth of many scholars in diverse contexts from Nepal and Bangladesh to Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Student Paper Competition Winners
The Natural Hazards Center created the Annual Hazards and Disasters Student Paper Competition as a way to recognize and promote the next generation of hazards and disaster researchers. The selection committee has chosen two winners for the 2019 competition, representing graduate and undergraduate scholarship.
Olumide Abioye: Graduate winner Olumide Abioye is a doctoral candidate and a graduate research assistant at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University-Florida State University College of Engineering. Abioye holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Akure, and a master’s degree in civil engineering with a concentration in transportation from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. His research interests include but are not limited to hazard mitigation, hazard preparedness, operations research, optimization, simulation modeling, metaheuristics, hybrid algorithms, transportation engineering, freight transportation, liner shipping scheduling, mathematical programming, and simulation modeling.
Tabitha Payne: Undergraduate winner Tabitha Payne is a senior at Brown University majoring in development studies with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. She is currently doing ethnographic fieldwork in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, that examines the policing and incarceration of LGBTQ Cambodians. The work, which is done in partnership with CamASEAN Youth’s Future, will inform her undergraduate honors thesis. Her academic interests lie in gender, sexuality, incarceration, globalization, Southeast Asia, Black critical thought, English literature, and theology.