CAS Visiting Professor lecture series was held in Institute of Mountain Hazard and Environment (IMHE), CAS in April, 2013, which was jointly held by Key Laboratory of Mountain Hazards and Earth Surface Process, CAS and IMHE group of Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS, and it lasted four days.

Prof. Nigel Wright from University of Leeds was the lecturer. Focus on the current hot issues on disaster risk management, the topics of lecture were as follows: Hazard Resilience: Current Research and Future Challenges; Flood Vulnerability Indices; Numerical methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics. Researcher Cuipeng, director of Key Laboratory of Mountain Hazards and Earth Surface Process presided over the lecture.

Prof. Nigel gave lecture in IMHE.(picture by IMHE)

Besides, Prof. Nigel gave a report on “How to Publish in International Journals”. Based on his experience, Prof. Nigel discussed a matter of common concern to us: how to write English smoothly, how to position and select journals for publishing, and how to feedback experts’ opinion.　 

More than 50 young staff and graduate students attended the lecture series.

Brief introduction to the speaker：

Prof. Nigel Wright has over 25 years experience in modelling fluid flow in the built and natural environment. Particular applications are inundation prediction, vulnerability assessment, river flows and low-head hydropower. Modeling techniques encompass Large Eddy Simulation, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, Godunov-based methods, parallel processing and model encapsulation.

More recently Nigel's research has focused on river basin management and integrated water resources management and the wider physical, social and economic aspects of each of these. This work continues through an EPSRC Discipline Hopping grant to spend time working in the Leeds Sustainability Research Institute.

Nigel has published over 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He has been awarded and managed grants over £4 million from a wide variety of funding agencies.  Along with co-authors in 2009 he was awarded the Harold Schoemaker Award of the IAHR for the best journal paper in the period 2007-9.

Until 2009 Nigel was a professor at UNESCO-IHE in Delft, the Netherlands where he still holds an appointment along with a chair at TU Delft.