Student science completed

A pair of CRC researchers have had their PhD’s accepted and are now contributing to the academic world of emergency and disaster management.

Dr Sarah Hall’s PhD focused on the effect of working on-call from home on the sleep and physiological stress of fire and emergency service workers. Her thesis sleep and stress in on-call fire and emergency service workers was last year accepted by Deakin University, and examines the ways in which the two main stress systems are affected by on-call work. Dr Hall’s project recorded sleep, wake and work patterns, as well as taking saliva samples over a two week period, from male fire and emergency service workers between aged between 18 and 75 years of age. 

Associate student Dr Ken Strahan had his PhD thesis accepted by RMIT University in 2017. Factors influencing household self-evacuation in two Australian bushfires investigated householder self-evacuation decision making during bushfires in the Perth and Adelaide Hills in 2014 and 2015. Dr Strahan’s research explored the factors that influenced householders’ decisions to evacuate, identified factors that predict self-evacuation and established the characteristics of self-evacuators. His findings showed that environmental and social cues and warnings and householders’ perceptions of the threat, of hazard adjustments and of other stakeholders, influenced self-evacuation decision making. Dr Strahan is now leading a CRC commissioned research project funded by the Victorian Safer Together program on the application of self-evacuation archetypes.