Dr. Tomoya Shibayama is a Professor of Coastal Engineering at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He is also a Professor Emeritus at Yokohama National University. He received his B.E., M.E. and PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo. Formerly, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and at the Asian Institute of Technology, and a Professor at Yokohama National University. He is one of the top leaders in disaster risk mitigation in Japan, particularly regarding tsunamis and storm surges, through the use of a wide range of methodologies that include hydraulic laboratory experiments, field surveys and numerical simulations. He has served as the leader of survey teams for all major tsunami and storm surge events since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. In 2019 he won the Hamaguchi International Award for Enhancement of Tsunami/Coastal Disaster Resilience.

Dr. Miguel Esteban is a former PhD student of Prof. Shibayama, and now also Professor of Coastal Engineering at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from Yokohama National University, and his MEng from the University of Bristol. Formerly, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University, and a post-doc fellow at Kyoto University and the United Nations University. His research deals with all aspects of coastal disaster risk management and adaptation to climate change and sea level rise, through the use of sustainability science multidisciplinary approaches to complement coastal engineering. He has followed Prof. Shibayama in all field surveys of major disasters since 2010.