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Each year, the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship—named for the late Natural Hazards Center co-director—honors outstanding scholars, practitioners, and students who share Myers' commitment to improving disaster management and reducing vulnerability.

The scholarship provides financial support to bring recipients to the annual Natural Hazards Workshop, where they can engage with experts in the field to enhance their research or professional goals and further their careers.

The selection committee was impressed with the unique and deeply personal approaches to hazards reduction and disaster resilience demonstrated by the three 2025 award winners.

Dana Murray is a PhD student in information at the University of Toronto, working at the intersection of emergency management and the gallery, library, archive, and museum field.

Murray has managed federal, municipal, and private museum collections across Canada. She said that practitioners in her field feel an immense responsibility for their collections, because they often hold a great deal of meaning for the communities they serve.

“These are things that came from family members, from friends; they’re attached to the place,” Murray explained. “You feel that obligation, like ‘I'm protecting it for others’—whether it's future generations or my neighbor down the street.”

The obligation to protect is becoming more difficult as instances of climate-fueled disasters like wildfires and hurricanes increase. According to Murray, emergency management trainings and up-to-date hazard plans are not common practice in the gallery, library, archive, and museum field, especially at small institutions where resources are stretched thin.

But that’s changing in response to an uptick in extreme weather events and high-profile close calls, like the blazes that encroached on the Getty Villa Museum during the Los Angeles Wildfires this year.

“People don’t want to imagine that a disaster will hit their collection, but if it does the stakes are super high,” Murray said. “So, I hope to see risk assessment and planning becoming more embedded in professional associations, institutions, education programs across the field.”

Murray hopes that meeting and learning from interdisciplinary professionals at the 2025 Workshop will help her develop the skills she needs to introduce more hazard and disaster planning for the protection of cultural heritage.

Oluwaseun Olowoporoku is an urban development and resilience expert with the World Bank Group. Since 2022, he has been developing interdisciplinary approaches to urban planning, climate adaptation, and disaster risk management in East and West African countries.

For Olowoporoku, who was displaced several times during his childhood in Nigeria due to chronic conflict and severe floods, the work is personal.

“I was a victim of displacement three times and the coping mechanisms—how my family readjusted during that period—are lessons I have not forgotten,” he said. “Whenever I'm working on hazard or risk, it's quite easy for me to situate myself, like ‘Oh, this happened to me too.'”

Helping governments develop better policies to respond to compounding vulnerabilities is at the core of Olowoporoku’s work. He’s done a variety of projects over his career, including building coastal resilience in the Niger Delta, creating a post-conflict needs assessment in Ethiopia, and—in a full-circle moment—developing a resettlement plan for flood victims in Nigeria.

In the coming years he hopes to increase the accessibility of research that helps communities break patterns of repeated disasters.

“I want to see improved data collection, storage, and sharing on hazard and risk management,” Olowoporoku elaborated. "How can we spread the information and continue to build awareness, build policy, and also talk about building the capacity of these communities to hazards, to disaster? Because they happen at local level. Communities feel it more.”

Olowoporoku was encouraged to apply for the award and attend the 2025 Natural Hazards Workshop by his friend and mentor, Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, a past Mary Fran Myers’s recipient himself. Olowoporoku said he is excited to attend and contribute to building a collaborative vision for the future of the hazards and disaster field.

Mohammad Newaz Sharif is a PhD student in public affairs at the University of Central Florida, specializing in emergency and crisis management.

Sharif’s career began with his personal exposure to disaster. His hometown of Bhola in coastal Bangladesh has a long history of devastating and deadly cyclones. Massive cyclones that hit in the 1970s and 1990s loomed large in the community’s memory as Sharif was growing up, and two more major cyclones hit in the early 2000s, as Sharif was entering university. A desire to help his community led him to study disaster science and management.

Since then, Sharif has built a robust career as an emergency management practitioner, working to support disaster response and humanitarian efforts through programs and interventions led by organizations such as Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Societies, CARE, and the United Nations across Bangladesh and the greater Asia-Pacific region.

Sharif began his doctoral studies in 2023, with plans to research ways to improve mental health and well-being for emergency responders, drawing on his many years of experience as a practitioner.

“Emergency responders witness immense suffering and devastation, yet we often overlook the toll it takes on their own well-being. You see the suffering, you return home, but the memories don’t just fade away," Sharif said. "Their resilience and dedication stem from a profound sense of duty, but we must ensure that they, too, receive the care and support they need."

Sharif aims to contribute to a more sustainable and compassionate emergency management system. He hopes attending the 2025 Workshop as a Mary Fran Myer scholar will be an opportunity to connect with other researchers and find more inspiration for this work.

“I'm so honored to be part of this community,” Sharif said. “And having this recognition, that motivates me to work more and to excel in my field. So that’s the true definition of a scholarship.”

As part of the Mary Fran Myers Scholarship, Murray, Olowoporoku, and Sharif will receive registration, meals, and travel expenses to attend the 50th Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop. You can learn more about the scholarship, which was made possible by a numerous donations from individuals and nonprofits in the hazards and disaster community, here. You can donate to this award or other Center activities via our giving page.