Douglas Paton, PhD, is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Disaster Risk Reduction at Charles Darwin University. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Bandung Resilience Institute (Indonesia), a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research (Massey University), and a Technical Advisor on risk communication to the World Health Organization.

His research includes developing and testing all-hazards (seismic, volcanic, tsunami, bushfire, flooding and health/pandemic hazards), cross-cultural (USA, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and Portugal) theories of community resilience. He is also researching long-term social recovery following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake (New Zealand) and the 2009 Typhoon Morakot (Taiwan) and how the “Linking Relief Rehabilitation and Development” and “Build Back Better” concepts can be applied to linking disaster recovery and community capacity building.

Douglas has published 21 books and some 160 peer-reviewed papers in this area and is developing a program on how using the visual and performing can inform disaster risk reduction strategies. He is Editor of the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters and sits on the Editorial Boards of Disasters, the International Journal of Psychology, the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Disaster Communication and the Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies.