Disaster Management

Panel: Disaster Management

 

Moderator: Paul Cunningham, Chair, IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee

Panelists: Ranjit R Nair, Suresh P. Ojha

 

"Kerala floods and IEEEs role in the civil society response".

 

Ranjit R Nair

 

Bio:

Ranjit Nair is currently working as Consultant Project Manager with Enlighten Technologies. He is a long time volunteer with IEEE , and was involved from the initial stage of Kerala flood relief. Ranjit also serves in IEEE EAB Student Educational resources Committee and is the Chair of Membership Development committee in Kerala Section. He was the founding Chair of IEEE Kerala Young Professionals Sight, one of the initially formed sight group globally.

 

“Lessons from the Nepal earthquake”

 

Suresh Ojha, President, GNPN

 

Bio:

 

Suresh P. Ojha is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the MTT Society.

In 2003, Suresh established the Nepal RF and Microwave teaching and research laboratory at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu Nepal.  He also spent one years establishing an RF and Microwave curriculum. 

In 2014 he was invited by the US Pacific Command to participate in the Pacific Endeavor 2014 Military communication exercises which took place in Kathmandu.  During the 2015 Nepal earthquake he was heavily involved in coordinating the response on behalf of the Nepali-American diaspora to the events on the ground in Nepal. Suresh is the US-based project leader of the Radio Mala amateur radio expansion program in Nepal.  This program installed the only functioning amateur radio repeaters in Nepal which were successfully used during the 2015 earthquakes.

He is President of the Global Nepali Professional Network (GNPN) http://www.gnpn.org.

 

 

Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen, Telecommunications Research Laboratory at Flinders University

 

Paul leads the Telecommunications Research Laboratory at Flinders University, Australia, where he focusses on developing communications solutions for challenging environments, including small remote communities and disaster affected areas. His recent work includes the development of a low-cost tsunami and all-hazards disaster warning system with integrated village-wide FM radio transmitter, following his philosophy that disaster warning and mitigation systems must have a use every day of the year, if they are to be expected to work when they are needed.