Arnab Majumdar's Inaugural Lecture

Arnab Majumdar gave his inaugural lecture earlier this year, which is available to view here.

Ultimately risk and safety in transport operations is about people, organisations, and their interactions not only with technology and infrastructure, but also with each other. However, assessing how humans perform in safety critical situations poses considerable challenges. For example, how can we reliably measure such concepts as workload, fatigue and safety culture for operators such as pilots and bus drivers? And even if we could, what is an acceptable safe level of workload and fatigue for such operators? And what about the vulnerable users of transport systems, how best can help them navigate their daily challenges? To answer these questions, it is essential to consider a variety of mixed methods including the analysis of physiological measurements, observations of daily work and asking individuals about their subjective experience.??Arnab Majumdar is Professor of Transport Risk and Safety at Imperial College London where he has spent 25 years researching this topic.

Arnab Majumdar is the Professor of Transport Risk and Safety and the Director of the Lloyds Register Foundation Transport Risk Management Centre (LRF TRMC) at the Centre for Transport Studies, Imperial College London. He is also the Deputy Director (External Partnerships) of the ESRC London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP), involving the Universities of Kings College London, Queen Mary and Westfield and Imperial College London. He is also a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation.

His PhD was completed in 2003 at Imperial College on the Estimation of Airspace Capacity in Europe. He also has MSc. degrees in Transport from Imperial College and Cognitive Neuropsychology from University College London. He has over 25 years of research and teaching experience in risk and safety in transport, in particular in Air Traffic Management (ATM), and has published over 100 journal papers. Of particular interest are human performance related aspects of transport operators, for example, workload and complexity issues faced by Air Traffic Controller (ATCo), as well as fatigue and driving errors in bus drivers.?In recent years his research has focused on the human and social factors associated with human behaviour when there is a threat to life, e.g. during a knife attack, fire and toxic substances. To do this he has used a combination of experimental and analytical methods including field trials, virtual reality, and wearable technologies.