Richard A. Matthew is Associate Dean for Research and International Programs and Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California at Irvine. He is also the inaugural Director of the Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation

ABOUT DR. RICHARD A MATTHEW, PHD

Richard A. Matthew (BA McGill; PhD Princeton) is Associate Dean for Research and International Programs and Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California at Irvine. He is also the inaugural Director of the Blum Center for Poverty Alleviation (http://blumcenter.uci.edu/); co-Principal Investigator for both the NSF-funded FloodRISE Project (http://floodrise.uci.edu) and the NOAA-funded SedRISE Project; Senior Fellow at IISD in Geneva; member of United Nations Expert Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding; a member of IUCN CEESP and co-chair of its Task Force on Conservation, Migration and Conflict; and Vice-President of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association (https://environmentalpeacebuilding.org ).

His research explores challenges at the intersection of nature loss and climate change, poverty and inequality, and disaster and violent conflict. Current research focuses on the co-development of visualization tools using big data and local knowledge to provide practical hazard risk management support to communities that are extremely vulnerable to flood events. Over the past twenty years, he has done extensive fieldwork in conflict and disaster zones in Cambodia, the DRC, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Swaziland. He served on UN humanitarian and peacebuilding missions in DRC, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. He has given three TEDx talks and been a featured storyteller on The Moth twice. He has over 200 publications.