Kaori Kitagawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education, Practice and Society, Institute of Education. Her research interests have been learning outside of formal education systems, with an application of comparative perspectives. Her current focus is disaster preparedness, particularly concerning community engagement and participation. Obtaining grants from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Anglo-Japan Daiwa Foundation, and the UCL Global Engagement Fund, she has developed a conceptual framework and methodology to investigate community preparedness and resilience. Considering preparedness activities as co-learning applying pedagogical perspectives, she has published widely in disaster research journals as well as educational journals. She has also worked with international collaborators on interdisciplinary projects, such as the 'Critical infrastructure collapse and population response' project funded by ESRC, which was five-country comparative research on preparedness. In 2020, she was based at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University as visiting academic undertaking fieldwork in rural communities in western Japan that were severely affected by flooding. Her most recent collaboration includes the study on climate change adaptation in indigenous communities in Fiji in the 'Transforming universities for a changing climate' project funded by GCRF.