Sliding Lands Hōretireti Whenua: PhD candidates
Following are details of students working on PhDs under this programme.
Anish Khanal: Understanding decision-makers’ interpretation and use of landslide models
About project:
Anish’s PhD explores how landslide-related information, particularly landslide susceptibility, hazard, risk, and runout models, is interpreted, communicated, and used by different people and organisations when making or supporting decisions. The research examines how model outputs are understood alongside local knowledge, uncertainty, operational constraints, and institutional needs. Through interviews, scenario-based tasks, and engagement with practitioners, the project aims to improve the usability of landslide information for planning, emergency management, infrastructure, and risk communication in Aotearoa New Zealand and Nepal.
About Anish:
Anish is a PhD researcher at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research (JCDR), Massey University. He did his Bachelor's in Science with geology as Major and did Masters in Engineering Geology from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He worked for 5 years in Nepal Himalaya doing landslide assessments to support communities at risk. His recent work focuses on bridging the gap between technical information/modelling and real-world practice so that landslide information can better support communities, agencies, and infrastructure decision-makers.
Jayaprakash Selvarajah: Integrating People’s Perspectives into Systemic Landslide Vulnerability Assessment in New Zealand
About the project:
Landslides pose a constant and multifaceted threat across New Zealand, generating cascading impacts that extend beyond physical damage to include social disruption, cultural loss, psychological harm, and institutional strain. This research aims to identify the multidimensional and interconnected factors that shape vulnerability to landslides by incorporating people’s perspectives and lived experiences into vulnerability assessment.
The research will integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches with systems thinking methods to develop a systemic vulnerability model that captures how social, economic, cultural, institutional, and environmental factors interact and contribute to cascading vulnerability.
About Jayaprakash:
Jayaprakash is a PhD student in Emergency Management at the Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Town and Country Planning and a Master’s degree in Data Analytics. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he spent eight years working as a Town Planner in Sri Lanka, specialising in landslide disaster risk management. His professional and academic work focuses on applying data-driven approaches to support landslide-resilient human settlement planning.
Rainer Hayer: Moving from Landslide Susceptibility to Landslide Hazard: Dynamic Modelling of Landslide Hazard.
About the project
This research explores how we can move beyond simply identifying where landslides are likely to occur, towards understanding when and how they may become hazardous. To do so, Rainer will use satellite imagery, rainfall records, and field measurements of landslide conditions and movement to investigate how rainfall-induced landslides develop and change through time and across space. Her aim is to improve how we understand and anticipate landslide hazards, with the longer-term potential to support forecasting and decision making.
About Rainer
Rainer is from Glasgow, Scotland and is currently based in the Department of Geography at Durham University. She holds a BSc in Environmental Science and MSc in Environmental Hazards and Risk. Her interest in natural hazards began as a young teenager after attending a Girls into Geoscience workshop, which introduced her to geoscience and motivated her to pursue the subject further. Since then, Rainer has developed her interest through both academic work and humanitarian volunteering.
Marius Scheider: Applying a GPU accelerated runout model to understand and forecast the runout of earthquake and rainfall induced landslides at a regional scale.
About the project
This PhD project develops an automated workflow using a GPU-accelerated landslide runout model (Orin3D) to simulate and calibrate thousands of individual landslides triggered by earthquakes (2016 Kaikōura earthquake) and rainfall events (e.g., Cyclone Gabrielle) in New Zealand. By comparing the mobility patterns of these two landslide types, the research aims to determine how factors like topography, geology, precipitation and others influence how far landslides travel. These calibrated results feed into a probabilistic parameter-prediction model that, combined with existing susceptibility maps and the numerical landslide runout model, will generate quantitative, spatially explicit hazard maps for future earthquake- and rainfall-triggered landslides in New Zealand.
About Marius
Outside academia, Marius spends most of his time with his partner, friends and dog hiking in the mountains or exploring new countries . When time allows, he likes to hit the slopes for skiing or grab a surfboard when he's near the ocean - and he tries to capture these moments along the way with his camera.
Dan Bain: Modelling landslide impacts on critical infrastructure
About the project
Dan is developing relationships between landslide intensity and impacts on critical infrastructure. This involves investigating previous landslides, such as those caused by the 2016 Mw 7.8 Kaikōura Earthquake and the 2023 ex-tropical Cyclone Gabrielle. This will help us understand critical infrastructure damage and functionality disruption during future earthquakes and severe weather events.
About Dan
Dan was born and raised in Wellington and completed his Bachelor of Science at Victoria University of Wellington. He then moved to the University of Canterbury to pursue a Master of Disaster Risk and Resilience, followed by a Master of Science. Now, Dan is based at the University of Auckland and is undertaking a PhD in Civil Engineering.