Dr Tagele Ashale
Dr Tagele Mossie Aschale is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, Durham University, UK. His research focuses on hydroclimatic extremes such as droughts, floods, heatwaves, and storms and their impacts on energy infrastructure systems, ecosystems, and communities, with particular relevance to climate adaptation and resilience planning.
Before joining Durham University, Dr Aschale was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Catania, Italy, where he modelled hydroclimate extremes to support climate adaptation strategies and contributed to research aligned with the EU Floods Directive and the PRIN-funded I-MOSAIC project. He holds a PhD in Evaluation and Mitigation of Urban and Territorial Risks (Hydroclimatology) from the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture (DICAR), University of Catania. His doctoral research examined the hydrological impacts of large-scale solar power systems, with a focus on evapotranspiration trends and soil water interactions in Mediterranean climates.
Dr Aschale also holds two master’s degrees: an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s in Maritime Spatial Planning with GIS (completed across Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Germany), and a master’s degree in environmental and Land Resource Management from Debre Markos University, Ethiopia and a bachelor’s degree in Geography and Environmental Studies from Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia. He has over a decade of academic and applied research experience in Ethiopia and Europe, including work on climate resilience, urban green infrastructure, and sustainable water–energy–food systems.
Dr Danielle Johnson
Danielle is a qualitative social scientist whose work explores the connections between hazards, climate change, human health, social identity and justice. Over the past ten years, her research has focused on the socio‑political drivers of community vulnerability to climate change and hazards, and on understanding how climate adaptation can both reproduce injustice and enable social transformation. She particularly enjoys collaborating with communities and practitioners to design and deliver research that fills knowledge gaps and supports local action on climate change and hazard resilience.
As a Postdoctoral Research Associate, Danielle brings a social science perspective to two of IHRR’s projects. She works primarily on the SAT‑Guard project, where she investigates the social complexities associated with energy disruption in the context of extreme weather. Using case studies from Northeast England, she is exploring community members’ uneven experiences of power cuts and extreme weather, examining how utility and emergency management organisations understand and operationalise vulnerability, and identifying the tensions and opportunities within current systems for managing electricity interruption. The aim of her work is to inform socially inclusive and equitable approaches to enhancing grid resilience in a changing climate.
Danielle also contributes to the BWEF Learnings project, collaborating with biophysical and social scientists from the UK, India and Japan. Together, they are building knowledge of the cascading impacts of hazards on biodiversity, water, energy and food systems across the three countries, and exploring how systems‑thinking approaches can strengthen hazard resilience and climate adaptation.
Before joining Durham, Danielle worked as a social scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (now Earth Sciences New Zealand). There, she was involved in interdisciplinary research supporting communities, land managers, local authorities and businesses as they adapted to climate impacts and strengthened their hazard resilience. She holds a PhD in Human Geography (2023) from the University of Auckland, as well as Master’s degrees from the University of Arizona (2017) and the University of St Andrews (2009).
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