Profile

I enjoy surfing and paddle boarding, so I try to do that as much as possible when I’m by the sea. I learned to surf in Devon, but when the waves allow it I also sometimes surf around Brighton Marina. I also love rock climbing, but I’m not very good at it.

My dream life would be spent visiting as many different places as I possibly could, and I’ve spent most of my education and working life trying to find different ways to make that happen. I’m making slow progress, but I’ve been lucky to visit lots of interesting places, and hopefully there’s a lot more to come.

I am a doctoral researcher in the Geography & Environment department at Loughborough University, in addition to being responsible for the QSAND shelter and settlement sustainability framework. My research is titled “Sustainable Housing as a Contributor to Community Resilience”, and I am looking at how different housing types influence relationships between people living in different communities, particularly in post-disaster contexts. This research emerged from my role as the programme manager of the QSAND sustainability framework, a decision-making support tool that was developed to help humanitarian shelter and settlement actors to consider the long-term sustainability of their shelter projects in the aftermath of disasters.

When you have to rebuild your home after a disaster, there are many different things to consider. Even for the experts in the humanitarian shelter sector, who are used to working in difficult contexts with limited time and resources, making appropriate decisions in terms of how shelter and housing should be rebuilt can be very difficult. QSAND aims to help make those decisions easier, whilst supporting communities to continue to develop and be sustainable over the long-term. For my research, I am hoping to explore how different housing approaches influence the relationships between different groups in an affected population, and help to make sure that housing reconstruction and recovery also supports strong community ties and friendships between neighbours, rather than inadvertently cause conflict or tensions between people.

As a doctoral researcher, my first year was very focused on reading lots of relevant literature to help me to understand the scientific justification for my research. This means that a lot of my time was spent reading other people’s work and looking at how they conducted their studies. I also have to keep an eye on more up-to-date news related to my research study area, which is in Malawi, in southern Africa.

A big part of being able to do research in the field is having connections to people who are working in communities, and particularly those working in shelter and housing contexts. I therefore speak quite regularly with humanitarian shelter practitioners and academic researchers who are working or who have worked in the areas where I am hoping to visit. This means I have a good network of people who will be able to help me when I’m in the field.

When I visit my research site, I will first be doing a QSAND assessment of the housing contexts. In the region I will be visiting, there is regular annual flooding that damages houses during the monsoon season, and occasional cyclones that can destroy some vulnerable buildings. I will therefore be looking at how communities have adapted and rebuilt after these events, and also trying to speak to people about their recovery process to understand what worked well and what could have been done better. This will help with the QSAND assessment, to show how successful the shelter programme has been.