Philipp Gewalt joined the TUM Landslide Research Group as a PhD student working on historic debris flow activity. He finished his B.Sc. in Geosciences at TUM and LMU and his M.Sc. in Geosciences at the University of Tübingen.
His research interest as a PhD student focuses on constraining the response of debris flow fans to past climatic change on short (< 100 years), intermediate (< 1000 years) and long (< 10 000 years) timescales. The main goal of this multi-scale approach is to determine what past examples of mega-activity (e.g. the formation of outsized megafans) can teach us about the characteristics of debris flow activity in a changing climate. This will help to improve the scientific foundation for hazard mitigation in alpine areas, where infrastructure and settlements are commonly located on debris flow fans.