Nando Lewis is a PhD candidate supervised by Frans Berkhout in the Department of Geography and Anja Shortland in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. After taking a gap year to cycle from Lima to Buenos Aires, Nando completed a BSc in Psychology in 2013 at University College London. During his BSc, Nando also took a module in primatology and this led him to Gashaka-Gumti National Park in Nigeria where he assisted a project researching chimpanzee tool use by the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. A short walk from Bedford Way to Tavistock Square ensued, where Nando completed an MSc in Security Studies, also at UCL.
Water is not only an academic subject for Nando. He was born in it, and his main leisure activities include underwater rugby and spearfishing. Nando’s passion for spearfishing has taken him to the Azores, Canary Islands, Madeira, much of the European Mediterranean, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the glorious coastlines of Dorset and Northumbria. Spending so much time underwater searching for fish has shown Nando the devastating impact that unregulated fishing (including spearfishing) can have on the size, number, variety and behaviour of fish. Nando enjoys travelling and is proficient in French, Spanish and German, maintaining his proficiency during the ‘off-season’ by reading fiction books in those languages. He hopes to find many more excuses to travel through his association with King’s Water.
Nando’s PhD asks How are water security, food security and forced migration related to civil conflict?
The project is mainly statistical and investigates the inter-relationships between water security, food security and forced migration. By developing an understanding of how these three themes interact, Nando plans to model their influence (if any) on civil conflict in the Horn of Africa. Nando is using freely available data for his analysis such as the CPC Merged Analysis of Precipitation dataset. His main problem is creating a dataset of forced displacement as currently available information is either not specific enough (spatially and temporally) or missing entirely. Nando is using satellite remote sensing to create a dataset of displacement by identifying newly created settlements or drastic changes in settlement size across the Horn of Africa.
Around King’s, Nando’s favourite place is the bike shed. When he’s there it either means he has just ridden his bike (which is great!) or that he’s about to ride his bike (which is even better!!).
Nando’s Water Words:
Fun
Fish
Freedom
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