Biography
Kristen MacAskill finished her PhD in the Centre for Sustainable Development in 2016 and she is now the associate course director of the Construction Engineering Masters course. Her research focuses on the application of sustainability and resilience principles in infrastructure project decisions.
She has a Bachelor of Civil Engineering (2006) and Master of Engineering Management (2007) from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is a graduate of the Centre's MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development (2012).
Beyond her academic pursuits, Kristen has worked for several years as a consulting engineer in both the water and transport sectors. Her experience covers diverse areas of infrastructure development, including: strategic level options assessment, post-earthquake damage assessment, infrastructure design, project management and sustainability assessment.
Through her experience, Kristen is highly aware of the challenges involved in integrating sustainability and resilience concepts into engineering project decisions, and in dealing with risk and uncertainty. She is particularly interested in urban reconstruction circumstances, where there are opportunities to "build back better" and advance the sustainability/resilience agenda for infrastructure development. This has led Kristen to focus her PhD research on exploring decision making in post-disaster urban infrastructure reconstruction activities, with an aim to understand the extent to which sustainability, resilience and uncertainty factors influence the reconstruction programme outcome.
She is supported by a Cambridge International Scholarship and she is a member of Corpus Christi College.
