Joshua Dimasaka, raised in an informal settlement along the highway of the small rural town of Paete, Laguna, Philippines, is a Filipino civil engineer, a PhD researcher at the University of Cambridge, and a Helmholtz visiting researcher at the German Aerospace Center. He leverages artificial intelligence methods and time-series Earth Observation data to audit regional spatiotemporal changes in exposure, physical vulnerability, and disaster risk profiles over time. His goal is to assess whether countries are making progress in reducing disaster risk, ultimately informing collective efforts under the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. Standing on the shoulders of giants, he aligns his work with the practice of regional disaster risk and catastrophe modeling, under the mentorship of Dr. Emily So (CURBE), Dr. Christian Geiß (DLR), Dr. Robert Muir-Wood (Moody’s RMS), and Dr. Fouad Bendimerad (EMI).

Joshua received his BS in Civil Engineering from the University of the Philippines Los Baños (magna cum laude and one semester early), MS in Civil & Environmental Engineering and MA in Public Policy as the first Filipino Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford University, Executive Education in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and MRes in Environmental Data Science at the University of Cambridge. He worked for Stanford Land, Buildings & Real Estate as an earthquake risk consulting assistant to Dr. Eng. Fouad Bendimerad and the local government of Quezon City (Philippines) as an EMI Urban Resilience Fellow to support data-driven policies to manage earthquake risks of over 400,000 buildings.