Speakers

Dr. Gloria I. López is a Geologist (U EAFIT, Colombia, 1993) with an MSc in Palaeoseismology (U Victoria, Canada, 2002), a PhD in Geochronology (U McMaster, Canada, 2007), Diploma in Natural Disasters (Instituto Mora, Mexico, 2015), and a Diploma in Public Policy (ESAP, Colombia, 2022). She is Colombia’s first expert in (palaeo)Tsunami Geology and Luminescence Dating (a method that determines the time elapsed since a grain of sand was last buried). She has >25 years of research experience in different temperate, tropical, and desert environments of South and North America, the Mediterranean, Asia, and Africa. Her interests include understanding how and when extreme events (tsunamis, hurricanes) and gradual environmental changes (sea level change, erosion, longshore drift, sediment transport) alter coastal systems, improving the understanding of different surface processes and geohazards, allowing the estimation of recurrence intervals to refine palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. After her postdoctoral research inventing new ways to differentiate tsunami sands from those left behind by severe storms/hurricanes (using luminescence as the key proxy) in complex coastal and underwater settings (including archaeological sites), she continues to look for new ways to improve disaster risk reduction. She has lived and worked as a Research Scientist, Field Geologist and Sessional/Adjunct University Professor (undergraduate and graduate programmes) at different universities and research institutes in over 15 countries. Since 2016 she is a Research Associate at the Recanati Institute of Maritime Studies (U Haifa, Israel), serves in the Board of Directors of the Iberoamerican Network Red Proplayas and is currently the President of the Colombian Geological Society (SCG).