Bruna De Marchi

Bruna De Marchi is an Italian researcher currently associated with SVT, UiB. She is also affiliated with Egesta Lab, Faculty of Science at UBC in Vancouver, Canada, and with the not-for-profit consultancy Società per l’Epidemiologia e la Prevenzione “Giulio A. Maccacaro”, Milan, Italy.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bruna studied Political Science and Sociology in Italy and the US. Her early research work was in sociolinguistics and in inter-ethnic relations at the Italian-Austrian-Yugoslavian border, long before the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After a devastating earthquake hit her region in 1976, she became interested in the sociology of disasters and helped to establish the Mass Emergencies Programme at the Institute of International Sociology of Gorizia, Italy, which she subsequently headed for some 15 years.

She has been engaged in a number of research, training, consultancy and planning activities, and she gradually expanded her interest for hazards and risks of natural origin to include those of human origin and most notably the interactions between the two. Her expertise in disaster planning, prevention, response and recovery is mainly in organizational, social and cultural aspects, including risk perception, communication and governance. From 1990 to 1994, she was summoned as a seconded national expert at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy. One of her tasks was to envisage strategies and design guidelines for the implementation of the information requirements mandated by the so called “Seveso Directive” on major-accident hazards.

Bruna is used to working in international and multidisciplinary settings, with colleagues from a number of different disciplines and backgrounds, as well as non-academic experts. Her most recent research projects are on health and environmental issues in areas exposed to pollution from industrial installations.