Gianluca Pescaroli

Gianluca Pescaroli is Professor in Operational Continuity and Resilience at University College London (UCL), and Senior Risk Advisor at the Centre for Risk Studies, Cambridge University. 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 -oriented, aiming to bridge academia and practice. In 2016, he co-founded the Research Group on Cascading Disasters at UCL. Since then, he contributed to strategic documents such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Guidelines on National Risk Assessment, Hazards Definition and Classifications Review, Regional and Global Assessment Reports, and edited documents 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. Gianluca organised has a track record of events organised in partnership with stakeholders. In 2021, he organised the Masterclass "Stress Testing for Building Infrastructure Resilience" with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and The Resilience Shift. In 2023, he developed the first “collegiate conference” with Disaster Recovery Institute International, which is the oldest and largest non-profit that helps organizations around the world prepare for and recover from disaster. Gianluca is now scientific lead of the new project “AGnostic risk management for high Impact Low probability events (AGILE), with 15 international partners financed by the Horizon Europe programme. He is partner in other projects financed by the ESRC, NERC and previously by the European Space Agency and Lloyd’s Register Foundation among others. In 2024, Gianluca became the scientific advisor to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Network of Corporate Chief Resilience Officers (CCRO), whose members represent companies from diverse sectors with combined revenues exceeding USD 300 billion across more than 100 countries.