Communication key for students

Several Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC PhD students and an early career researcher have submitted a video showcasing their communication skills in the hopes of winning a competition run by the Cooperative Research Centre Association (CRCA).

The CRCA’s Early Career Research Showcase is a communication competition open to early career researchers that involves submitting a 30 second video that clearly outlines their research.

The competition focuses heavily on the way in which the researchers were able to simplify their information and clearly and concisely describe what they are working on.

Five finalists will be choosen to attend the CRCA annual conference in Adelaide on 28-30 May, where they will each present on their research. The winner of the competition will be decided by audience vote at the conference and receive $5,000.

Watch the CRC researcher's submissions here. 

Avianto Amri (above) explains his research on disaster risk reduction and education for children, building disaster resilient households through a school-based education intervention with children and their families. Recent studies on disaster education have demonstrated that although programs have increased awareness and knowledge of children, there is little evidence of any significant improvement or change at home. Therefore, his research has been initiated to develop an innovative tool through a participatory process to encourage children to actively engage with their parents in improving household preparedness. Now, the tool has been transformed into a comprehensive toolkit.

Mitchel Scovell explains his cyclone education and preparedness research, investigating the psychological factors that influence cyclone mitigation behaviour. Cyclones can cause significant damage to houses in the Tropics. For older housing, in particular, structural upgrades can mitigate losses. However, the majority of older houses in these areas do not have these upgrades installed. His research found that how people think about cyclones and structural upgrades helps to explain their mitigation behaviour. These findings are being used to inform cyclone preparedness messaging to promote the uptake of structural upgrades in high-risk areas.

Dr Rachel Westcott explains her community bushfire safety research, advancing public health in the context of natural hazards: normalising preparedness within a framework of adapted Protection Motivation Theory. Her research proposes public health policy and processes to assist people to negotiate natural hazards in an increasingly hostile, climate change induced environment. This is achieved by normalising preparedness – to make ‘fire-fitness’ routine and everyday. With data gathered from a diverse regional community in South Australia, Dr Westcott's research identified achievable locally bespoke and societal wide strategies to narrow the awareness-action gap and promote public safety and resilience.

Sesa Singha Roy explains her fire behaviour modelling research which is a development of an interface for improving computational performance of bushfire simulation tools. Bushfires are natural hazards that take a toll on life, property, and the environment. If these fires can be simulated, proper mitigation plans can be executed. Physics-based models simulate these fires in near-realistic scales as they delve into physical and chemical details of the fire. However, the major setback of these models is the high computational expense. Her research aims at reducing this computational expense, resulting in faster simulations, faster mitigation, and reduced damage.