Dr Georgios Karagiannakis
Research Fellow - Marie Curie

Dr Georgios Karagiannakis is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the resilience engineering of critical infrastructure in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Brunel University of London and a member of the metaInfrastructure research group. Within the MSCA PF META-GRID project, his research focuses on the resilience assessment and adaptation of the European power grid against climate hazards, addressing challenges related to power grid vulnerability modelling, recovery assessment, climate change, and infrastructure investments. He will be seconded to Électricité de France (EDF) in Paris to collaborate with industry experts on power grid engineering, climate adaptation investments, and the development of restoration models for transmission assets. He will also undertake a secondment at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in Ispra to advance climate risk and resilience assessment methodologies, exploit geospatial and climate-hazard datasets, and support the translation of research outcomes into European policy and practice. In addition, he will visit the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus to further develop and validate resilience assessment tools for energy infrastructure under future climate and energy scenarios.

During his PhD studies, he was also a Marie Curie Fellow and trainee at the JRC of the European Commission and addressed the risk assessment of industrial pipe racks and equipment against earthquake hazards, contributing to one of the first studies in this area. His research integrates engineering, climate hazards, probability and socio-economic approaches, with applications to infrastructure adaptation, disaster risk reduction and post-hazard recovery.

Dr Karagiannakis has authored more than 25 publications, including papers in leading journals such as WIREs Climate Change, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Structures, Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, International Journal of Steel Structures and Buildings. His research on the seismic vulnerability and risk assessment of industrial facilities has received international recognition, with publications attracting more than 150 citations and extensive use by researchers and practitioners worldwide. One of the fragility models he developed has been adopted by the EUCENTRE Foundation to support the development of real-time emergency navigation systems for industrial facilities.

Before joining Brunel, he held research positions at Politecnico di Milano and the University of Sannio, Italy, where he contributed to several European and national research projects on infrastructure resilience, risk assessment and climate adaptation. He has undertaken research secondments at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (Italy) and Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH (Germany), strengthening his expertise in probabilistic risk assessment, infrastructure modelling and resilience-based engineering.

He has participated in and managed research activities in several major European projects, including SARIL, BRIDGITISE, the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) project RETURN, and the H2020-MSCA-ITN project XP-Resilience.