Jacob Samuels

Jacob studies how people make decisions during urban evacuations, particularly in emergency and conflict-related scenarios. Using immersive virtual reality experiments and surveys, the research examines how social influence, official information, environmental risk cues and individual characteristics shape evacuation behaviour and route choice. Combining this evidence with discrete choice and agent-based modelling, it aims to represent human behaviour more realistically in evacuation simulations, and to improve how evacuation procedures are designed and evaluated in support of civil preparedness, emergency planning and humanitarian response.