Research team member Ante Pilipović participated at the 2025 Edition of the PhD Autumn School in Security, Risk and Vulnerability: Insights from the RETURN project” organized by prof. Serena Cattari, coordinator of the PhD program on Security, Risk and Vulnerability at the University of Genova, Italy. The autumn school was held in Sestri Levante near Genova from September 22nd-26th, 2025 and was targeted to Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD candidates, post-doc researchers and early-career scientists working on seismic and flood risk at urban scale, who are interested in broadening their knowledge through a multi-risk approach, one of the cornerstones of the Italian RETURN project.
The activities included:
- Cross-cutting lectures and round tables open to all participants, aimed at exploring the key aspects of multi-risk studies. These sessions will draw on the expertise of researchers from the RETURN partnership and internationally renowned researchers, with the involvement of decision-makers engaged in mitigation policy planning and civil protection, as well as experts from the insurance sector and NatCat companies.
- Workshops where participants will work in groups to gain hands-on understanding of the interactions between exposure, vulnerability, and hazard in multi-risk studies, and the resulting impacts not only on the built and natural senvironments, but also on society.
- Lectures organized into two parallel sessions (each consisting of eight talks), allowing participants to choose based on their background—either in seismic or flood risk—to delve deeper into recent research developments in their area of interest.
Particularly interesting were the workshops by Claudio Marciano on using a storyline approach and impact chains for better framing of the multi-risk environment and participatory approach to communication between different stakeholders involved in risk management, from engineers and scientists to decision makers.
A poster session was organized where PhD students presented their research, engaged in discussions with other PhD students and received valuable advice and direction from the professors and lecturers. Ante Pilipović participated with a poster titled “Optimal Intensity Measure Selection for Unreinforced Masonry Buildings using Vulnerability-based Metrics.”