Core team

The following individuals are core team of the Standby Task Force. They deal with the overall organization of each project, and are all volunteers as well. The skills and backgrounds within the team span over wide fields. What they all have in common, is their passion and commitment to keeping the Standby Task Force up and running.

Valeria Villan

Valeria has a background in International Relations and Political Science, and solid experience in communication. She has also worked on several projects promoting local development, corporate social responsibility and innovation. She loves data and everything digital.

Stuart Costello

Stuart’s background is in Logistics, Supply Chain, Distribution and Operations Management. He joined as a Micromapper and took part in the Namibia project then he learned about SBTF and joined in the middle of the West Africa Ebola deployment. He joined the Core Team to help manage the regular business of the SBTF.

George Chandeep Corea

George is a Conservation and GIS specialist, interested in pre-planning open-source spatial intelligence for stakeholders to gain additional insights in post disaster activations. He has been involved with Disaster Management since the Asian Boxing Day 2004 Tsunami when he was running a conservation organisation and did surveys of the largest protected areas that were affected and also helped in direct relief. In a local council in Australia he worked in the disaster coordination centre to help in spatial intelligence for pre-planning  (bushfire, flood and radio comms modeling) and post event relief coordination.

Troy Powell

Robert “Troy” Powell holds an Honours BA, an MA in Conflict Analysis and Management and a certificate of training in Post-Conflict Transitions and International Justice. Having spent much of his graduate years researching genocide prevention, early warning and geopolitics, Troy has self-professed “healthy” obsession with complex problems as well as grass roots mobilizations leveraged to solve them. An alumni of the International Peace and Security Institute, (IPSI) and Royal Roads University, Troy showcased a peer-to-peer presentation of some of his research on non-linear early warning at the IPSI Hague Symposium on Post Conflict Transitions in 2013. A lifelong academic Troy is inspired by learning, synergy and the discovery of unexpected solutions. He is very excited to be joining up with the SBTF as an Academic Coordinator. In his spare time he likes to read, play the saxophone and contributes to a blog on pop-culture/comics and politics called Graphic Policy.

Deepshikha Dalchand

Deepshikha’s background is in Biotechnology and Environmental Science. Introduced to the world of GIS while on a field semester in the Peruvian Amazon, she’s been fascinated by the potential uses of it ever since. A technological ‘newbie’, she spends her time honing her digital skills and learning about the wonderful world of data science.

Leisa Weld

Leisa has a PhD in statistics and has used it in a myriad of ways, particularly in public health including data management during emergency responses. She also has done communications support for large international groups and project management for website and database development. She loves data. Leisa began volunteering with SBTF in early 2016 and has volunteered with HOT and UN Volunteers.  Because of moving a lot she speaks some Spanish and a little German and French.

Romy LaCour

Short presentation will apear here