Introduction and Context

The UME (Understanding and Managing Extremes) Graduate School has been set up by the IUSS Pavia (Institute for Advanced Study, Pavia) to run a number of graduate programmes geared towards the evaluation of uncertainties, risk mitigation and emergency management. The key objective is to provide a system within which Masters and Doctoral candidates can study, understand and deal with extreme events. The UME Graduate School is hosted at the European Centre for Training and Research in Earthquake Engineering (EUCENTRE).

Graduate Programmes

The programmes of UME have been initially designed to deal with three main areas:

• disaster risk assessment, focusing mainly on natural hazards such as earthquakes hurricanes, fires, landslides and floods (with possible extensions to the topics of climatology, desertification, human-made and technological risks etc.)

• extreme situation management, which includes topics of statistics and probability, law, economics, resource management, finance, insurance, sociology, ethics, psychology and medicine.

• engineering for risk mitigation, which includes topics on engineering to increase the capacity of buildings and infrastructure to withstand the demands from extreme events.

Currently, the ROSE Masters and Doctoral programmes of the UME Graduate School are fully operational, whilst one Masters programme was recently launched in September 2011 (Risk and Emergency Management, REM) and one Masters programme on Weather Related Risks (WRR) is being planned for the 2012/13 academic year.