Jan Hayes

Professor Jan Hayes provides an original perspective on safety and risk management, coming from Down Under, and building on her multifaceted background and experience coming from various industries (e.g. oil and gas, petrochemicals, mining, manufacturing and transportation) and Academia, operations and design, engineering and a sociology.

Professor of Organizational Accident Prevention at RMIT University, she is a Program Leader for the social science safety research activities of the Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre and a Board Safety Assurance Advisor for Airservices Australia. Her research interests all connect to preventing major disasters and include professionalism, experiential learning, expertise, decision making and use of standards.

Her most recent work, together with Pr. Sarah Maslen, is as usual grounded on very rich empirical studies, and focuses on professionals’ ethics in the doing of technoscience (See book: Ethics in the Doing of Technoscience) and engineers rationale when it comes to making design decisions today that may affect public safety tomorrow (See book to come: Between Calculation and Catastrophe).