Dr Laura Dawkins
Laura is an Expert Scientist in Climate Risk & Resilience. She develops innovative approaches for translating hazard into risk, using statistical modelling techniques to add value, informing stakeholder climate decision making.
Areas of expertise
- Hazard to Risk
- Statistical Modelling and Data Science
- Extreme Value Analysis
- Climate Resilience
- Natural Hazards
Current activities
Laura is an Expert Scientist in the UK Climate Resilience Team. Her expertise relate to three key areas: translating hazard to risk, statistics & data science, and creating routes to impact. She is leading the implementation of a novel risk framework capability providing impactful advances in this area of Met Office science and services.
Laura works closely with users across multiple sectors, developing statistical and data science modelling approaches to help them better understand the impact of weather and climate on their operations and infrastructure. These applications span governement, transport, energy, water and insurance sectors. Laura specialises particularly in Bayesian statistical modelling and statistical extreme value analysis.
Career background
Laura joined the Met Office in 2018, and has work in the Industry Science & Consultancy team, the Science for Impact, Resilience & Adaptation team and the UK Climate Resilience team.
Prior to this, Laura was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter and (for part of this time) at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. During this time she worked with world leading Bayesian statisticians in the UK and Australia, developing statistical modelling methodologies for societal and environmental applications.
Laura obtained a first class honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Bristol and completed a PhD in Statistics at the University of Exeter, in which she used extreme value statistical approaches to better understand the relationship between extreme European windstorms and insured loss. As part of her PhD, Laura undertook a placement with an industry partner, Zurich Insurance. The results of this project provided Zurich with a better understanding of their wind related insurance claims, understanding which is now used to inform the pricing of natural hazard insurance in Europe.
