Lolita joined ADPC in 1999 and was involved in the implementation of the ECE Program until 2001. From 2001-2002, she served as Information Manager for ADPC's Partnership for Disaster Reduction - Southeast Asia (PDRSEA) project. Currently, as a Project Manager, Lolita is responsible for administration, training, documentation and research.Her research interests focus on the role of community-based local institutions in climate risk management. Lolita is trained in community-based disaster management, and is a trained instructor. She holds a Master degree in Environmental Engineering from the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand.

Dr. Selvaraju has fourteen years of applied climate risk management research and project implementation experience. He is with ADPC from April 2005. As project leader and principal investigator at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, India, he has been involved in many programs on climate forecast application and climate change adaptation to enhance resilience of communities exposed to climate risks in South and South East Asia since 1998. He managed community based participatory climate risk management activities and capacity building workshops to enable farmers and extension workers to apply climate information for risk/opportunity management. He has developed methods and generic frameworks for implementing climate and agriculture programs. His experience includes application of system models in drought risk management, water resource allocation, whole-farm integrated risk management; communicating probabilistic climate information; farm level decision analysis; and potential value of ENSO based climate forecasts. Current interests are natural disaster risk and vulnerability analysis, livelihood adaptation to climate change, downscaling and tailoring locally usable climate forecast products, institutionalizing and mainstreaming climate risk management in development planning, impact of disasters and damage-loss assessment. Dr. Selvaraju holds a Ph.D in Agriculture (1993) specialized in agro-climatology and modeling. He has received seven awards for original research contributions and published more than 40 research papers in peer reviewed journals.

An architect-planner by profession, Ramraj joined the Climate Risk Management team of ADPC in May 2006 under the Danida project, Enhancing Community Resilience to Natural Disasters in Southeast Asia. Since 2003, he was with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Sri Lanka on various disaster management programmes. His extensive work experiences extended to projects and programmes in disaster management with the UNDP and several NGOs in Orissa, India.

Atiq joined ADPC in 2006 and is currently working with the CRM Team in the USAID Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning Systems (IOTWS) program, operating in five countries of the Indian Ocean region. He is involved with “Coastal Community Resilience Program" providing social science inputs to devise end-to-end multi-hazard early warning systems in the region. His key areas of expertise are climate change adaptation, community based livelihoods-vulnerability & risks assessments, integrated coastal management, participatory & socio-economic investigations, governance, resilience building and so forth. Atiq comes from a strong academic background of applied anthropology and social sciences, acquiring his bachelor degree in Social Anthropology and his Masters in Social Sciences from JU, Bangladesh. His second Masters degree is in applied anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Atiq brings with him extensive applied research and project management experiences.

Before joining ADPC, he was involved with CEGIS in Bangladesh and has worked empirically in almost all the ecological zones of the country. As Project Leader or Principal Researcher, he has spearheaded numerous projects and studies, namely the UNDP supported “Seasonal Crisis (monga) Study”, FAO-SIFAR supported “Coastal Livelihoods Vulnerability Study”, FAO-DAE supported “Vulnerability Assessment for Agricultural Disaster Risks Management” (SSDP project), UNDP-FAO supported “Livelihoods Vulnerability and Climate Change Adaptation Study in the Drought Prone Areas” (LACC Project) and UNICEF aided “Perceptions of Hygiene Study in Hill Tracts". Beside these major projects he has also coordinated the stakeholder consultation of “Haor (wetland) Rehabilitation Project” and ADB aided “Participatory IWRM plan in K-JDA of SW Bangladesh”. He was also one of the lead national facilitators of the sectoral NAPA for Climate Change in Bangladesh.

Fakhruddin joined ADPC in November 2005. He provides technical inputs in developing an end-to-end tsunami early warning system with a multi-hazard framework for Indian Ocean countries under the USAID Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System program. Prior to joining ADPC on a full-time basis, he has worked as a part-time country coordinator of Bangladesh for the Climate Risk Management Team since 2002.

His key areas of expertise are hazards detecting, designing early warning and dissemination system, emergency communication and response management, mainstreaming Incident Command System (ICS), environmental, land, and water resources management, flood monitoring using Radar Satellite Imagery, integrated water resources management, and gender mainstreaming. Fakhruddin has a civil engineering degree. He has also studied water resources management, mathematical modeling, and GIS.

Kareff collaborates with CRM team members and project partners in implementing projects that are aimed at mitigating the adverse impacts of climate variability on societies. She also carries out research, particularly related to analyzing climate-related problems and understanding institutions and policies. She is mainly responsible for coordinating the Climate Forecast Applications program in Indonesia and the Philippines.

Prior to joining ADPC’s CRM Team in January 2006, Kareff spent six years of her professional life in Manila, Washington, D.C., and New York as a researcher on climate, participatory governance, and environmental management issues. She first worked on climate issues as the first senior researcher and content manager for the Earth Council Learning Center, an Internet-based global school on sustainable development based in Manila. She later moved on to an internship on climate forecast applications project with the Policy and Institutions group of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society in New York. In between, she attended to various research and project management responsibilities for the Social Development Research Center and the Global Development Network.

Kareff holds a Masters in Climate and Society from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University in New York. She also completed graduate-level coursework in International Studies at De La Salle University in Manila. Her undergraduate training is in Political Science from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, where she finished cum laude. She was born and raised in Bukidnon, a province in the southern Philippines.