ILEE Lunch Seminar

Jean Bosco Ngabiorano (Geography): "Toward integrated approach for flood risk reduction and community resilience - Analyzing risk creation process and management strategies at a catchment scale."

Integrated management is considered to be an effective approach for dealing with flood risks. However, risk management seems to remain fragmented and risk reduction efforts are outpaced by disaster risk creation. The aim of this study is to investigate how integrated flood risk management can be improved for a catchment subject to recurrent flooding. Thus, understanding the root causes of risk creation and assessing the current strategies of risk management helps both to understand what needs to be addressed to reduce risk while building community resilience, and to identify existing capacities and gaps in the implementation of an integrated approach for this purpose. This will help to propose effective and sustainable strategies that are adapted to the context.

Jean Bosco does his PhD thesis under the supervision of Sébastien Dujardin within a collaborative project "Towards a watershed community in Bujumbura: participatory and interdisciplinary action research on resilience strategies in the face of so-called natural disasters", financed by ARES.

Justine Bélik (URBE, Biology) informs us about her ongoing research on the mangrove rivulus, and "Epigenetic aging in a self-fertilizing vertebrate species".

Studying aging is an essential feature of ecological studies. Here, we studied the epigenetic aging of a self-fertilising vertebrate and developed the first tool to determine its age. We then studied the biological significance of the selected genes and linked them to human aging.

Justine is doing her PhD thesis under the supervision of Frédéric Silvestre. She just came back from the 3rd international Symposium EPIMAR 2025 on “Epigenetics in marine and aquatic research” in Barcelona, Spain. Her participation was supported by a grant from the Fonds Adrien Bauchau.

Exceptionally, we have a third speaker this time: Moses Musau (Geography) is coming from Kenya and will tell us about the "Utility of hospital data in determining community disease epidemiology and burden".

With the rapid improvement in the quality of hospital data surveillance, there is an opportunity to utilise hospital data to understand community disease epidemiology and burden. However, the representativeness of disease burdens at the community level remains a persistent constraint on the utility of hospital-based disease surveillance. This doctoral project aims to leverage routine hospital data to develop methodologies to overcome the biases associated with defining disease epidemiology and burden in the community using hospital surveillance data.

Moses is doing a PhD under supervision of Catherine Linard in collaboration with Peter Macharia from the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp.

Please order your sandwich before Friday 13th, 18h.
carolin.mayer@unamur.be

Sandwich list here (no hot sandwiches please)