Tuesday 9 July 2013

Presentation of post doc program

After defending my PhD thesis, I worked in a consulting agency, where I advised on the design of critical work environments to reduce the risk of human error, typical in maritime and offshore settings. After some time there, I was offered a post doc research position at the University of Bergen, although in a different department than where I did my PhD. The post doc was funded by the Research Council of Norway, and was intended to provide actionable input to the Norwegian hydrocarbon industry. Thus I had to turn to a more applied research focus than in my previous basic research on neurocognitive mechanisms, but I was able to relate some of my experience as a consultant in the field.

My post doc project included three different venues of research:
  1. Cognitive lab experiments modelling mechanisms of risk behaviour and situation awareness
  2. Analysing larger data sets to examine how different individual and organizational variables are connected, and developing an inventory for measuring situation awareness
  3. A field study of teamwork in emergency response teams, where the team's training exercises were examined to see to which extent the team members had the same situation awareness 
The third project turned out to become the main focus of my post doc years. After one and a half year on the project, I gave a short presentation of the theoretical model and preliminary results to my faculty colleagues at our annual research seminar: