After 15 years working in safety & risk management in natural resource industries in Canada, Laura began studying new ways of supporting front-line practitioners in high hazard work and in organizing and designing work systems to enable safe, productive operations through the lens of resilience engineering. She brings a grounded and adaptable approach to studying users that helps define clear problem statements and facilitates collaborative work across multiple stakeholder groups to find integrated process and product solutions.
Her doctoral work focused on studying responders in large scale distributed incident response and helping organizations cope with complexity, adapt at the pace of change and improve industrial systems performance. She has guest lectured at industry associations, regulatory agencies, private companies, and internationally.
As a climber and backcountry skier, she is interested in how complex, adaptive systems theory can inform risk assessment, decision making and expedition team dynamics during high risk activity in the mountains. Her work in this domain focuses on understanding expert performance in professional guiding and forecasting contexts in addition to influences in shaping recreational mountain-based team dynamics.
Laura is an international keynote speaker, a mentor and advocate for women in STEM who loves learning and sharing knowledge both with colleagues and audiences around the world and across domains to promote greater understanding of everyday work.
