Biography
Sally O’Brien is a final year PhD student at the Future Infrastructure and Built Environment Centre for Doctoral Training at the University of Cambridge and is supervised by Dr Kristen MacAskill. Her research interests are in infrastructure risk management, data and information management, data and information mapping and strategic decision-making. Her PhD work explores how data and information is utilised within large-scale infrastructure organisations in response to multi-hazard risk. She has worked closely with a variety of infrastructure sectors including electricity, water and rail networks.
She studied Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering in Trinity College Dublin between 2012 and 2016 and graduated First in her class. She has also completed an MPhil in Energy Technologies at the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil research focused on the feasibility and long-term potential of implementing an autonomous public transport system in Milton Keynes, UK.
She also worked on the Innovation and Long-Term Strategy Team in SSE Airtricity, an energy supply company in Ireland, before continuing her education at the University of Cambridge.
She is a member of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Research
Sally’s PhD work explores how data and information is utilised within large-scale infrastructure organisations in response to multi-hazard risk. Her research will develop a methodology to assess organisational capability for managing multi-hazard risks and will explicitly investigate data quality and information fragmentation across an infrastructure organisation. The aim of her research methodology is to illustrate, though a form of information mapping, data flows and conversions in an infrastructure organisation’s risk management processes. The research will also create opportunities for the infrastructure organisation to increase its ability to manage data and information more effectively.
Publications
O’Brien, S. and MacAskill, K., (2019) 'Infrastructure system management – understanding and advancements in the methods and approaches for interdependency analysis’. In: 2nd International Conference on Natural Hazards and Infrastructure. Chania, Greece, 23-26 June, 2019. (online availability forthcoming).
