2016 Dr Kristen MacAskill

Kristen MacAskill (BEng (Hons) MEM (Dist) MPhil (Dist) PhD) is the Construction Engineering Masters Associate Course Director at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.

See: http://www.construction.cam.ac.uk/centre-staff/kirsten-macaskill

Email: kam71@cam.ac.uk

PhD Research:

Kristen MacAskill commenced her PhD in the Centre for Sustainable Development in 2012. Her research focused on the application of resilience principles in infrastructure project decisions.

Kristen has a Bachelor of Civil Engineering (2006) and Master of Engineering Management (2007) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is a graduate of the Centre’s MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development (2012).

Beyond her academic pursuits, Kristen has worked for several years as a consulting engineer in both the water and transport sectors. Her experience covers diverse areas of infrastructure development, including: strategic level options assessment, post-earthquake damage assessment, infrastructure design, project management and sustainability assessment.

Through her experience, Kristen is highly aware of the challenges involved in integrating sustainability and resilience concepts into engineering project decisions, and in dealing with risk and uncertainty. She is particularly interested in urban reconstruction, where there are opportunities to “build back better” and advance sustainability and resilience agendas for infrastructure development. This led Kristen to focus her PhD research on exploring decision making in post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction activities, with an aim to understand the opportunity to increase resilience as part of the reconstruction process.

Kristen was supported by a Cambridge International Scholarship. She is a member of Corpus Christi College.