Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
Faculty Fellow

Ali Asgary is an expert in disaster, emergency and business continuity management. He has been actively involved in research, teaching and professional activities in these fields since 1993. His research has been published in leading disaster and emergency management journals including Disasters, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, International Journal of Disaster Science, Disaster Prevention and Management, Environmental Hazards, International Journal of Emergency Management, International Journal of Business Continuity and Risk Management, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, and International Journal of Emergency Services, among others. He was among the founding faculty members who started the first university program in Disaster & Emergency Management in Canada at Brandon University in 2003 and later on among the founding faculty embers who started Disaster & Emergency Management at York University. Dr. Asgary served as the IAEM Canada president between 2007 and 2009 and as the board member of IAEM during the same period. He has led as a PI, Co-PI and collaborator in a large number of research projects funded by different agencies including NSERC, GEOIDE, SSHRC, PreCarn, CIHR, NFRF, ORF, Transport Canada, Public Safety Canada, Wellcome Trust, IDRC, and DRDC. Since 2015 Dr. Asgary has been the executive director of York University's Advanced Disaster, Emergency and Rapid-response Simulation (ADERSIM). His research interests include post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, business continuity and risk assessment, disaster and emergency simulations and modelling, applications of AI, VR, AR and MR, and geomatics in disaster and emergency management, and cost-benefit analysis and decision making under uncertainty.
Research keywords:
Post disaster recovery and reconstruction; emergency exercise; technology enhance disaster and emergency management training; volunteer management; disaster modelling and simulation; agent-based modelling; organizational and business resilience; population displacement; emergency and humanitarian logistics
You may also be interested in...
Spotlight – James Stinson, Reflections on a Postdoctoral Exploration of Planetary Health Education
Between 2019 and 2023, I had the privilege of serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow cross-appointed to the Dahdaleh Institute of Global Health Research and the Faculty of Education at York University, co-supervised by Dr. James Orbinski and Dr. Kate Tilleczek. As ...Read more about this Post
York profs lead $5.5 million HEATSCAPE-Africa project
Originally published by News@York (2 October 2025) By Emina Gamulin Benedict Weobong and Godfred Boateng head international team exploring climate-related heat, sleep and mental-health issues with funding from leading global charity Wellcome TORONTO, Oct. 2, 2025 ...Read more about this Post
Recap – Rising Heat and Restless Nights: The Impact of Elevated Temperatures on Sleep and Cognition
What is the relationship between sleep, our ability to think clearly, and climate change? This was the question that Dahdaleh faculty fellow Professor Godfred Boateng and Dr. Gabriel John Dusing, who is a Research Fellow, ...Read more about this Post
