David E. Alexander
发布: 2010-4-23 00:40 | 作者: xiaoli | 查看: 44次
David Alexander was born in London and graduated in geography
at the London School of Economics. In 1977 he obtained his PhD
in Mediterranean geomorphology from University College London
(UCL). From 1978 until 1980 he was Research Fellow at UCL,
during which time he studied erosional processes in clay
badlands. From 1982 until 2002 he taught geomorphology,
physical geography, natural hazards and disaster studies at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst (USA). He has also
taught extensively at five Italian universities and, briefly, at the University of the South
Pacific in Fiji. He has participated widely as a teacher in emergency management
training courses and currently directs disaster preparedness training for the regional
government of Lombardy in Italy, where he is the Scientific Director of the Advanced
School of Civil Protection. He collaborates extensively with emergency services at all
levels in Italy. In addition, at the University of Florence he was a leading member of the
team that designed, launched and taught Italy’s first Master of Civil Protection course.
For the academic year 2002-3 he was Professor of Disaster Management at
Cranfield University in the UK, based at the Royal Military College of Science, where he
directed the Cranfield Disaster Management Centre. During 2004 he was Professor and
Head of the Disaster Management Subject Group at Coventry University, UK, the
largest centre for disaster studies in Britain. Currently he is Ministerial Contract
Professor of Disaster Management in CESPRO, Centre for the Study of Risk Conditions
and Civil Protection at the University of Florence. He is based in the Faculty of Medicine.
Alexander is a registered survivor of the November 1980 earthquake in southern
Italy, which killed 2735 people and injured 8841. It led him to make natural hazards and
disasters his principal research interest. His published journal articles, reports and
working papers, which number more than 100, include studies of seismic landslides,
post-earthquake urban planning problems, logistical aspects of emergencies, the
sociology of panic and the epidemiology of disasters. His book Natural Disasters was
published in 1993 by University College London Press (subsequently Routledge) and
Chapman & Hall (now Springer) and has been reprinted on various occasions. His latest
books on the subject are Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural
Disasters (2000), a world survey of the field and its theoretical development, and
Principles of Emergency Planning and Management (2002), a practical manual of
counter-disaster work. Both books are co-published by Terra Publishing in the U.K. and
Oxford University Press in the USA.
Alexander has also studied tectonic geomorphology in the Italian Apennines and
Peruvian Cordillera Oriental. He developed methodologies for field surveys of landslide
risk. In the 1980s he devised the equivalent of the Mercalli scale for landslide damage
to buildings and settlements. In addition, he has written extensively on the pre-Huttonian
history of geomorphology and has published analyses of the work of Dante and
Leonardo da Vinci.
David Alexander is a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals
Geomorphology, Natural Hazards, Disaster Prevention and Management and the
Journal of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering. From 1985 until 2001 he was
Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Environmental Management (he is still on its
Editorial Board), and for some years he also edited the Springer Book Series in
Environmental Management, published like the journal by Springer-Verlag New York.
He was co-editor and principal author of the Encyclopedia of Environmental Science
(Kluwer, 1999) and is currently co-editor of the journal Disasters. At present he is
working on an encyclopaedia of natural hazards.
Contact details:-
Tel:(+39) 055 822 9423
Mobile: (+39) 333 432 8832
Email: D.Alexander@virgilio.it / David.Alexander@unifi.it
David Alexander - Recent and representative publications
Alexander, D.E. 1993. Natural Disasters. University College London Press, London, and Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Dordrecht and Boston, 632 pp.
Alexander, D.E. and R.W. Fairbridge (eds) 1999. The Encyclopedia of Environmental Science,
Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht and Boston, 741 pp.
Alexander, D.E. 2000. Confronting Catastrophe: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Terra Publishing,
Harpenden, UK, and Oxford University Press, New York.
Alexander, D.E. 2002. Principles of Emergency Planning and Management. Terra Publishing, Harpenden,
Herts, UK, and Oxford University Press, New York. (hardback and paperback). Publication: March 2002.
Alexander, D.E. 2002. From civil defence to civil protection--and back again. Disaster Prevention and
Management 11(3): 209-213.
Alexander, D.E. 2003. Towards the development of standards in emergency management training and
education. Disaster Prevention and Management 12(2): 113-123.
Alexander, D.E. 2005. Towards the development of a standard for emergency planning. Disaster
Prevention and Management 14(2): 158-175.
Alexander, D.E. 2005. Vulnerability to landslides. In T. Glade, M. Anderson and M. Crozier (eds) Landslide
Hazard and Risk. Wiley, Chichester, UK: 175-198.
Alexander, D.E. 2006. Globalization of disaster: trends, problems and dilemmas. Journal of International
Affairs 59(2): 1-22.
Alexander, D.E. 2006. Crisis intervention and risk reduction. In W.J. Ammann, S. Danneman and L. Vulliet
(eds) Risk 21: Coping with Risks Due to Natural Hazards in the 21st Century. A.A. Balkema, Taylor and
Francis, London: 51-56.
Alexander, D.E. 2007. Misconception as a barrier to teaching about disasters. Prehospital and Disaster
Medicine 22(2): 95-103.
Alexander, D.E. 2007. Making research on geological hazards relevant to stakeholders' needs. Quaternary
International.