Dr Laura Dawkins
Laura is an applied statistician and scientific manager. 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
- Natural Hazards
Current activities
Laura is the Scientific Manager of the Science for Impact, Resilience and Adaptation team. This involes setting the scientific and strategic direction of the team who specialise in developing and applying the Met Office's world-leading science to address customer requirements, across sectors, for weather and climate information.
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 October 2018, working for 3 years in the Industry Science & Consultancy team, and for 1 year in the UK Climate Resilience team before becoming the manager of the SIRA team.
Prior to this Laura spent 2 years as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter and 6 months 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 in 2011 and completed a PhD in Statistics at the University of Exeter in 2016, 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 spent 3 months working 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.
