hosted by Professor Michael Leigh


Debarati Guha-Sapir is the Director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, a Professor at the University of Louvain School of Public Health, in Brussels, and member of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Belgium. Guha-Sapir founded EMDAT, an international reference database on natural disasters.

Trained at Calcutta University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Louvain, Guha-Sapir has a PhD in epidemiology.

She is involved in field research and training in humanitarian aid issues, working closely with the World Health Organization, UNHCR, UNDP and European Commission in various regions of the world, including China, Sudan, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, the Great Lakes, Somalia and Central America. Her research is focused on human impact of disasters and conflicts using Epidemiological methods. She is now researching global trends and patterns of human impact of disasters using several multidisciplinary datasets. Another area of her research is cause of mortality from crises events - a central theme for progress in the Sustainable Development Goals. Guha-Sapir collaborates with diverse researchers all over the world and is actively involved in field trials for effective measures of disaster risk reduction. In 2023 she was awarded the Blue Planet Prize.