Tom is an Associate Professor in Disaster Risk and Resilience at the University of Canterbury. Originally from a farm in central Canterbury, he studied the impact of volcanoes to agriculture, infrastructure systems and communities here in NZ and around the world. Then during the Canterbury and Kaikoura Earthquake Sequence he took a keen interest in their impacts to rural communities and the role science can play in helping increase disaster resilience. Tom’s research group focuses on using interdisciplinary approaches to try understand and assess the impacts of natural hazards to critical infrastructure, primary industries and rural communities. He is co-lead of the Rural – Co-creation Laboratory within Resilience to Natures Challenge – which is a $20M applied natural hazard and disaster research programme funded by MBIE. And he is a member of the science team working on Project AF8, helping to try understand the likely impacts of a future Alpine Fault earthquake and inform how to increase resilience for such events…which forms basis of this talk today.