Building resilience for a changing world: A conversation with Caroline Field
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.