Gianluca Pescaroli

Dr Gianluca Pescaroli is Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Business Continuity and Organisational Resilience at University College London (UCL). His research investigates how to build and improve the continuity of operations during disruptive events, how to minimise their impacts, and how to increase the resilience of the public and private sectors. This includes managing complex challenges such as cascading risks, critical infrastructure failures, systemic and compound dynamics.

Gianluca’s work is impact-orientated, aiming to bridge academia and practice. In 2016, he co-founded the Research Group on Cascading Disasters at UCL. Since then, he has contributed to strategic documents such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Guidelines on National Risk Assessment, and edited reports such as the Guidelines on Cascading Effects of Wide-Area Power Failures in collaboration with London Resilience. He was one of the lead authors of the Flagship Report Science for Disaster Risk Management 2020: acting today, protecting tomorrow, drafted by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. 

He is active in consultancies for local authorities and international organisations on topics such as resilience to cascading scenarios and stress testing. In 2020, he became the director of University College London’s multi-disciplinary Master programme in Risk, Disaster and Resilience.