Joshua Macabuag is a consultant specialising in disaster risk engineering.

Among his multiple roles he is a Catastrophe Modelling Consultant for the World Bank. He initially worked with the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team on multiple research trips to Japan following the 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami. This inspired him to research how to help buildings survive tsunamis, and he now models the impact on buildings and infrastructure of natural disasters and other catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. This can be immediately post-disaster, or pre-disaster through calculating damage for likely future events.

He has been an Urban Search and Rescue Engineer for SARAID (Search & Rescue Assistance in Disasters) for the last 12 years. Here he volunteers as a search and rescue engineer, which involves spending weekends away training with rescue teams. taking part in exercises to locate and extract people trapped in collapsed buildings. Josh travelled to Nepal after the devastating earthquake of 2015 as part of SARAID whose team were among the first international rescue teams to arrive there. More recently the team were deployed in the earthquake-hit zones in Turkey.

He has recently started applying his experience in modelling the impacts of natural disasters to the sector of offshore renewables, to inform proper risk management of these assets.

His talk will look at how engineers get involved in understanding and mnaging the impact of seismic events with examples across the disaster management cycle - response, recovery, mitigation, and preparation.

"Joshua is a truly outstanding speaker and has contributed much to dealing with disaster relief across the developing world. If you can get a chance to see him speak it will be worthwhile…... Joshua is really impressive! ….you will see a brilliant mind in action” David Mackenzie, Director, COWI.