Sean Wilkinson

Sean Wilkinson is a Reader in Structural Engineering with over 20 years’ experience in how natural hazards affect the built environment, how failures of these systems impact communities and how to improve the resilience of these systems to extreme events.   His main climate research is to produce risk models for infrastructure networks.  He was the Co-I on the ECLISE project that produced windstorm models for national risk assessment of electricity networks to both current and future climate and worked with the ENA to consider how future wind storms may impact distribution networks.  The research in this work was used to inform the District Network Operators 2nd round reports. His risk models are based on a catastrophe modelling approach and he has developed Catastrophe type models for the UK transmission Network as well as for interdependent infrastructure systems (water, electricity, telecommunications and transport).  His latest research has produced a near-time damage assessment tool that can predict damage and outages to electricity distribution networks up to 36 hour prior to a forecast storm.  His work has also developed a method for producing fragility curves for electricity infrastructure that can be used to predict electricity faults in electricity distribution networks.