The Institute for Security Science and Technology (ISST) established the Centre for Active Resilience and Security (CARS) in 2023. CARS is an Imperial Centre of Excellence and is the flagship initiative delivering the ‘Resilient society’ strand in Imperial’s academic strategy.
CARS undertakes multidisciplinary research to enable society to take a systems approach to risks and threats.
Modern societies are increasingly interconnected ‘systems of systems’. CARS’ research and its resulting outputs can be adopted by a broad range of stakeholders to identify and build critical capabilities, improving their ability to respond to emergencies and threats.
The CARS website will launch in Spring 2025. In the meantime, if you are interested in finding out more about CARS’ work, contact resiliencecentre@imperial.ac.uk.
Find out more about CARS’ projects to date below.
Leadership
Centre Director
- Professor Washington Yotto Ochieng, Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Interim Director, Institute for Security Science and Technology
Centre Co-Directors
- Professor Julie McCann, Vice-Dean (Research), Faculty of Engineering
- Professor Jonathan Eastwood, Professor of Space Physics and Deputy Head of Department (Physics) for Infrastructure and Health & Safety
Professional staff
- Qiong Wang, CARS Centre Manager
- Anna Friman, Project Officer for Resilience
- Max Swinscow-Hall, Research and Innovation Manager
CARS projects
Resilient Renewable Summits
CARS launched and has hosted two editions of this conference series with ISST, EIS Council and Imperial’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering:
Each event welcomed international government and policy, academic and industry colleagues to discuss different sectors’ approaches to resilience. Summaries from the R2S summit will be shared via the CARS website.
Resilience in London community responses
The London Resilience Unit (part of the Greater London Authority) commissioned CARS to produce a report titled ‘Mobilisation of community venues for resilient response and recovery’. The report details examples of groups in London mounting efforts to overcome challenges affecting their local communities.
Critical energy survival workshop series
Between September 2024 and May 2025, CARS is hosting remote sessions for international experts working on critical energy resilience challenges and dual-use solutions. The workshops will encourage cross-sector individuals/organisations to share learnings, enabling attendees to draw from colleagues' experiences and develop innovative solutions for maintaining critical infrastructures and systems in crises/catastrophes.
If you are interested in taking part, please contact resiliencecentre@imperial.ac.uk.
Our people
General contact
Institute for Security Science and Technology
Level 2 Admin Office, Abdus Salam Library
Imperial College London
South Kensington Campus
London SW7 2AZ
securityscience@imperial.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 20 7594 8864