About
I am a scholar in Risk Sciences with 15 years of experience as a consultant in aeronautics, oil and gas, and government, including serving as Senior Research Officer for the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). I have also spent 10 years as an academic at the University of Southampton Business School (USBS).
I have extensive experience as a research leader. I served as Principal Investigator for the Horizon 2020 BRIDGES project (€1.8M), leading Work Package 7, and was PI for a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with ASV Ltd (£166K) on risk and reliability methods for unmanned marine surface vehicles. At the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), I also led the Marine Autonomous Systems in Support of Marine Observations (MASSMO) project (£800K) and phase one of the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) on Adaptive Autonomous Ocean Sampling Networks (£1.45M).
From 2022 to 2025, I was Head of the Department of Decision Analytics & Risk at USBS, the largest department in the School with 42 academics. During my tenure, I oversaw eight MSc programmes and one BSc programme, initiated the creation of the new BSc in Business and Artificial Intelligence—the first of its kind in the UK—and introduced effective work allocation and recruitment processes that raised the department’s average research output to 3.22/4, exceeding the REF2021 submission three years ahead of REF2028. Staff retention during this period was among the highest in the School. I previously served as Programme Leader for the MSc in Risk Management (2019–2022), during which student numbers increased from 20 to 65. I have also served on the School’s MSc Scrutiny Board and as external examiner for Liverpool John Moores University and Glasgow Caledonian University.
I chaired the 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023) in Southampton, the most profitable ESREL conference to date for both ESRA and the University of Southampton, generating a profit of £110K and a 32.7% profit margin.
My international profile includes membership on several advisory boards and technical programme committees. I was one of three advisors for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Ocean Networks project (a $20M programme), a member of the Technical Programme Committee for the Blue Ocean Network (Portugal–Norway–Liechtenstein, €8M), and a technical reviewer for major Canadian research initiatives.
My research in Risk Analysis and Risk Management has had significant impact. I was the lead author of the University of Southampton Business School’s REF2021 Impact Case Study, which achieved the School’s highest REF impact evaluation to date, ranked 14th nationally. My work on operational risk management for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) contributed to record-breaking missions beneath the Antarctic and Arctic ice. The Subjective Statistical Survival Estimator I co-developed was central to the Autosub-3 mission under Pine Island Glacier—the first under-ice mapping of this region—and later informed the risk analysis for the 10,000 km ISE Explorer AUV mission under Arctic ice, the longest mission of its kind.
According to ScholarGPS, I am ranked in the top 0.09% of scholars in Risk Management over the past five years and in the top 0.45% over my career. My work appears in leading journals including Risk Analysis, Safety Science, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology. I serve on the Editorial Board of the ASCE–ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems (Parts A & B).
I hold a PhD in Safety-Critical Systems Assurance and Risk Management from the University of Bristol (2005–2008), where I developed decision-support systems for compliance with IEC 61508-3 software safety standards. My teaching focuses on Project Risk Management and Quantitative Methods for Risk Management, and I currently supervise a research group of 10 PhD students working across security, aviation, infrastructure, maritime operations, logistics, agriculture, and healthcare.