Dr Kristen MacAskill

Dr Kristen MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Engineering, Environment and Sustainable Development at the Department of Engineering. 

She is a Fellow and Engineering Director of Studies at St Edmund's College.

Throughout her career, Kristen's interests have centred on themes of disaster risk management, post-disaster reconstruction, sustainable development of cities and resilience of infrastructure systems. She has four engineering-based degrees and before returning to a role in academia, Kristen worked for several years as a consulting engineer in both the water and transport sectors. Her industry experience covers various areas of infrastructure development, including: strategic level options assessment, post-earthquake damage assessment, infrastructure design, project management and sustainability assessment. She now specialises in systems analysis to advance approaches for managing risk and system resilience. Using cross-disciplinary research methods she investigates governance issues in the management of critical infrastructure and the delivery of major projects.

Kristen is currently involved in Royal Academy of Engineering and Lloyd's Register Foundation Safer Complex Systems programme (https://www.raeng.org.uk/global/international-partnerships/engineering-x/safer-complex-systems).

She is a founding editorial board member of a new IOP Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability journal, which was launched late in 2020 (https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2634-4505). 

Kristen has led various initiatives for the Resilience Shift since it was established in 2017 and has ongoing involvement with this industry-oriented initiative. The Resilience Shift is an international programme created by Lloyd's Register Foundation and Arup, with the goal of facilitating a shift towards resilience in critical infrastructure sectors (https://www.resilienceshift.org/securing-our-future-through-resilient-infrastructure/)

Supervised PhD research covers themes of climate adaptation, critical infrastructure resilience and socio-technical analysis of infrastructure service provision.

Dr MacAskill leads teaching in Resilience and leads the MPhil ESD Client Consultancy programme where student teams work with businesses, NGOs and other stakeholders on consultancy style projects.

Kristen’s LinkedIn page is https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-macaskill-ab85551a/