As we prepare for this year’s Resilient, Renewable Society Summit, we sat down with our new Visiting Professor, Caroline Field, to discuss her career journey, what resilience means in today’s increasingly complex world, and why building resilience across organisations, infrastructure and society has never been more important.
Welcome to the Department! Can you tell us a bit about your career journey and what led you to focus on resilience?
Sure! I graduated in 1996 with a BEng in Civil and Structural Engineering from the University of Bath. After working for a few years, I came to Imperial to do an MSc in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, which had always been an area of interest for me.
I then moved to San Francisco with Arup to work on performance-based analysis and engineering, focusing on structural dynamics and extreme loads. In 2007, I left Arup to join a small women-owned engineering consultancy specialising in blast engineering and counter-terrorism consulting. This gave me the opportunity to understand how to run a business while continuing to tackle the technical challenges of blast design.
In 2013, I returned to the UK with my two children and re-joined Buro Happold, where I focused on building capability in resilience, security and risk. As part of this, we looked at structural resilience as well as broader resilience across infrastructure, buildings and cities. I then broadened this into organisational resilience and now resilient leadership, so whole of system and whole of society resilience is now my area.
I now lead National Resilience at PA Consulting, where I work with central and local government, alongside critical national infrastructure providers, to develop proactive and targeted strategies that build resilience across systems and organisations.
You’ve worked across a range of fields, from counter-terrorism and earthquake engineering to organisational resilience. What connects these areas for you?
I think the connection is protecting people and helping systems build capacity (resilience) for whatever comes at them, and we certainly need this more than ever now!
What does “resilience” mean to you, and why is it so important for organisations and communities today?
Resilience is the capability to prepare for disruption, adapt in a timely manner, and thrive in a changing environment.
A resilient approach provides a platform for responding and adapting to a dynamic business environment, allowing leaders to take measured risks with confidence and respond quickly and appropriately to both opportunities and threats. Whilst risk prevention and mitigation are important parts of resilience, it is not just a defensive strategy. It is a positive, forward-looking strategic enabler. Resilient organisations are agile and proactive: aware of, anticipating, creating and taking advantage of new opportunities. In short, they thrive in the face of adversity.
We are all part of a global ecosystem and reliant on colleagues, partners and suppliers as part of our value chain. As we’ve seen recently with Ukraine and Iran, disruption in other parts of the world can have a significant impact on our businesses. Climate change will cause further disruption to global supply chains. We need a robust understanding of where our ecosystems are vulnerable and what we can do to improve their capacity.
How does your work and experience in resilience align with what is happening here at CEE? Are there particular areas of overlap, initiatives or collaborations you’re excited about?
Yes, there’s lots of overlap. I’m excited to contribute to the Centre for Active Resilience and Security, as this aligns well with my work. I’m also doing a lot around resilient leadership, which I’m incorporating into our summer school programme and, hopefully, into a separate Lifelong Learning programme moving forward.
I’ve also been supporting the WEInnovate programme with resilient leadership workshops, which has been very rewarding. More broadly, I’m hoping to help link research, practice and policy to shape the direction of travel around resilience.
The Centre is hosting the Resilient, Renewable Society Summit with EIS Council this September. This is the second year you’ll be joining us. What are you most looking forward to?
I’m looking forward to a vibrant, practical discussion on what we can tangibly do to move the dial on whole of society resilience.
The last RRS Summit was held in 2024. How far do you think the resilience field has come since then? How would you describe the current state of societal resilience?
Since 2024, the UK Government has released its action plan (2025) and Implementation Report (2026) to deliver national, whole of society resilience, and I’m seeing greater awareness and wider application of resilience across government.
Looking back at the crises and near misses of the past 12 months, what’s the resilience lesson you wish more leaders had acted on?
Systems, not silos! Most crises and near misses are caused by a lack of joined-up thinking and understanding of interdependencies. I also think there is still too much reactive rather than proactive, strategic resilience that targets interventions before they are needed.
As an alumna of our MSc in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, how did your time in the Department shape your career, and what advice would you give to current students hoping to follow a similar path?
To be honest, doing this MSc really was the catalyst for where I am today because it set me on the trajectory towards resilience. It gave me the opportunity to work overseas and tackle some of the most exciting engineering challenges and projects around the world.
What are you most looking forward to about working with our students and staff?
I’m looking forward to getting to know my new community, particularly helping students prepare for the rather turbulent future we’re facing and working with colleagues to help deliver whole of society resilience.
Specifically, I’m hoping I can bring three things:
- Being a female mentor and role model for students.
- Being a link between research, practice and policy in the area of resilience, helping to solve the big challenges ahead of us and shape the future direction of CARS.
- Helping to develop future leaders through Imperial’s Lifelong Learning Programme.