CCRM Researchers

Practicing policy analyst with a long-term focus on risk and uncertainty and most recently on society’s critical infrastructures. Author or co-author of many articles and books, including Narrative Policy Analysis (1994), Taking Complexity Seriously (1998), Ecology, Engineering, and Management (2002), High Reliability Management (2008), Making the Most of Mess (2013), Reliability and Risk (2016), and When Complex Is As Simple As It Gets (forthcoming).

Carl Macrae is Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Psychology in the Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning at Nottingham University Business School. His research examines how organisations manage safety, reliability and resilience; how people make sense of and learn from unexpected events; and how organisational and regulatory systems can be designed to support learning and improvement. Carl regularly advises organisations, regulators and policymakers on challenging safety and risk issues. His work led to the establishment in England of the first system-wide, learning-focused safety investigation body for healthcare, the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB). His book, Close Calls, examines the work of airline flight safety investigators and the practical work that is involved in learning from ‘near-miss’ incidents in complex, safety-critical systems. Carl is also a Professor II in the SHARE Centre for Resilience in Healthcare at University of Stavanger, Norway.

Anna Serra-Llobet is an environmental scientist whose research concerns to flood risk management policies. Anna Serra-Llobet received her PhD in Environmental Sciences from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2011. After finishing her PhD, she interned at the Directorate-General for the Environment at the European Commission (EU) in Brussels, working on the analysis of EU funded research related to hydro-meteorological risks (floods and droughts) and vulnerability assessment in Europe. Currently she is a researcher at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management of the University of California at Berkeley, conducting research on sustainable flood management strategies in the US and the EU.

David is the CEO of Christenson & Associates, LLC, a consultancy group primarily serving safety-critical, high-risk industries doing business as O4R: Organizing For Resilience since 2014.

David contributes to this organization as it serves clients with education, training, coaching and mentoring The New View with Relational Coordination & Leadership, High Reliability Organizing, Resilience Engineering, Crisis Management, Human & Organizational Performance, Event Learning Teams, Safety I-II, Critical Thinking, and Inspiring Leadership through Emotional & Social Intelligence and Psychological Safety. He has been an invited speaker on these topics throughout the USA, Europe and Australia.

Dr. Hamedifar is a senior strategy manager with over 12 years’ experience in strategic business transformation, risk and reliability assessment and management, project execution, digitalization performance improvement, and client relationship management for a variety of industrial, professional body, and government client. His experience with project, program, and portfolio management covers offshore and onshore oil and gas, utilities, natural gas liquefaction, chemical process, and maritime industries.

Dr. Lane is developing methods to provide chemical-specific detection of threats and risks caused by releases of chemicals using advanced standoff chemicals sensors that can protect ports and other local critical infrastructure, emergency responders, and the public by creating a 3-mile radius of chemical surveillance.

Dr. Lane’s chemical security network enhances Maritime Domain Awareness by providing situational awareness and a Common Operating Picture of the threats and risk of chemical releases, enhancing response and recovery capabilities to not only ports, but also emergency responders and USCG, keeping ports open to the transportation of commerce.

Esfandiar Imani is the co-founding member and Executive Director of SafeR3, a California non-profit that specializes in risk and crisis management education and technology development that disseminates state-of-the-art and innovative enterprise risk management to state-of-the- practice via pragmatic tools and education that increase safety, resilience, and reliability as well as measurable risk-reduction.

Mr. Imani is a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (risk.berkeley.edu). The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) is a group of academic researchers and internationally recognized experts and practitioners in the fields of engineering, social science, medicine, public health, public policy, and law, who recognize the need for interdisciplinary solutions to avoid and mitigate tragic events.

Kofi Inkabi is a principal risk management consultant at Exponent with over 15 years of experience in the energy utility sector. Exponent is a premier engineering and scientific consulting firm with over 900 expert consultants worldwide. Kofi’s consulting focuses on developing actionable yet effective solutions to address the most pressing problems and concerns of utilities (wildfires, climate change, aging infrastructure, etc.). He has completed a full range of risk and reliability studies and investigations for natural gas pipelines, gas facilities, electric power transmission and distribution facilities, including vulnerability assessments and process improvement. Kofi has experience working alongside operators to develop and enhance everything from data management, human performance, to asset prioritization and investment decisions. Kofi has investigated a number of major engineered system failures, including those due to equipment and human performance issues, and is well-experienced in causal evaluation methods to identify apparent and root causes and corrective actions to prevent recurrence.

Ian I. Mitroff is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. Credited as one of the founders of the modern field of crisis management, Mitroff has published over 40 books, including a seminal work on proactive crisis management “Why some companies emerge stronger and better from a crisis: 7 essential lessons for surviving a disaster.” Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Martelli’s research focuses on organizational errors and the interdisciplinary application of models, such as High Reliability Organizing (HRO), to promote system safety and reliability. He has worked on various aspects of these issues both in healthcare settings and in other industries, including wildland fire and emergency response, oil exploration, and civil and industrial infrastructure. He has been a member of CCRM since 2007 and served as its Co-Director from 2018 to 2021. He holds a PhD in Health Services and Policy Analysis from UC-Berkeley and an MSPH from Thomas Jefferson University, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the VA Center for Organization, Leadership, and Management Research, and was an Exchange Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University. In 2021-22, Dr. Martelli is a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a Visiting Professor at iaeLyon School of Management in Lyon, France. More information is available here: https://martelli.page/

My research activities focus on sense-making processes in organizations facing complex environments, including large-scale incident management teams, security critical agents, national crisis operations centers, etc. In recent years, I have been increasingly working in the healthcare sector on crisis management in the operating room, improving the childbirth experience, providing care for migrants.

Dr. Storesund is the Executive Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (risk.berkeley.edu). His research focuses on safe and reliable critical infrastructures. He earned a Bachelors of Arts from UC Santa Cruz, a Bachelors of Science in Civil Engineering from UC Berkeley, a Masters Degree in Civil Engineering at UC Berkeley, and a Doctorate of Engineering in Civil Systems at UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow at the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Senior Member and Certified Diplomat in the National Academy of Forensic Engineers. He is also the CEO and Founding Member of Storesund Consulting (a nice civil engineering and forensics firm); Storesund Construction Services (a civil works construction company employing High Reliability Organization (HRO) techniques and strategies); and NextGen Mapping, Inc. (a software start-up company focused on leveraging big data associated with infrastructure systems to improve decision-making and connect decision-makers with real time (or near-real time) business intelligence models to enable informed and educated decisions).

Ms. Schaefer is a nationally recognized expert in flood risk management. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the UC Davis Watershed Science Center, examining opportunities to convert flood risk into value. She is a passionate advocate for replacing our nation’s antiquated flood control philosophy with a modern, science-based, data-driven, integrated flood risk management philosophy that builds resilient communities. The dire economic consequences of flooding can be reduced by pooling community resources and actively managing flood risk. Changes in catastrophe modeling, global finance, and sensor technology are making new innovative flood insurance arrangements possible. With an Own, Manage, Monetize framework, a community-based flood insurance program can leverage these changes bringing badly needed capital and risk information to communities. Her research is focused on the expanded role of insurance in bringing capital and risk management expertise to community flood risk management.

Ms. Schaefer has over 30 years of water resources management experience, working in both the public and private sectors. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Nebraska and a Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Virginia and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at UC Davis.

Paul R. Schulman (B. A. Tulane University, M.A., Ph.D. in Political Science from the Johns Hopkins University) is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley and Emeritus Professor of Government at Mills College in Oakland, California. He has written extensively on managing hazardous technical systems to high levels of reliability and safety, within organizations and across networks of organizations. His books include (with Emery Roe), Reliability and Risk: The Challenge of Managing Interconnected Critical Infrastructures (Stanford University Press, 2016), High Reliability Management (also with Emery Roe) (Stanford University Press, 2008), and Large-Scale Policy-Making (Elsevier, 1980). He has been a consultant to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, the California Independent System Operator, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Invitae, a genetic testing start-up and an advisor to the California Public Utilities Commission. He is currently a member of the Joint Genome Institute’s Synthetic Biology Internal Review Committee in the U.S. Department of Energy.