People
Dr Jamie Wardman
Associate Professor of Risk
School/Department: Business, School of; Marketing, Innovation, Strategy and Operations, Department of
Email: jw935@leicester.ac.uk
Profile
Dr Jamie Wardman is an Associate Professor of Risk at the School of Business, University of Leicester. His research examines how risk, crises, and uncertainty are perceived, managed and communicated by organisations and different cultural groups.
He has received over £685k research funding for projects undertaken in Europe and Asia across a range of risk related domains, including food safety, terrorism, climate change, nuclear disasters, flooding, modern slavery, information and technology, and emerging infectious disease outbreaks.
Before joining Leicester Jamie worked at the University of Nottingham and prior to that at the University of Hong Kong. He completed his PhD at King’s College London.
Jamie has more than 30 published works, including a recent edited collection ‘COVID-19: Confronting a New World Risk’. His publications can be viewed here:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=M_iMsFcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Jamie also serves as Editor of the Journal of Risk Research and as a board member for the Society for Risk Analysis – Europe.
Research
During his academic career, Jamie has studied the emergence and impact of risks and crises across a range of domains, including food safety, radiation, terrorism, climate change, modern slavery, information and communications technology, flooding, and emerging infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19.
He has been especially interested in understanding how risk, danger, and uncertainty are managed and communicated by organisations, including the different ways in which risks are perceived, represented and spoken about, the roles of leadership and collaboration in risk-related decisions and response strategies, how this affects preparedness and resilience, and the systems by which organisations interact with others, whether through global supply chains or public institutions and the media when seeking to define and control risks.
In the course of his work, Jamie has perhaps become best well-known for introducing an influential framework that sets out a ‘constitutive’ view of the mutual links between different risk and crisis communication imperatives and processes, which has been widely employed in international research and policy reviews.
Jamie's research has received competitive grant funding from a variety of awarding bodies, such as the Environment Agency, the Higher Education Funding Council of England, the European Food Safety Authority, the World Health Organization, the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the Horizon Group East Midlands, and the UK Royal Society.
In one recent widely noted project, Jamie contributed to the Royal Society COVID-19 evidence review, which made recommendations to UK Government regarding the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on reducing the spread of the disease.
The analysis and insights provided by Jamie's work have also more broadly attracted national and international media attention appearing in news outlets such as the Times and Guardian newspapers, the FT, Bloomberg news, and the Discovery Channel, amongst others.
Jamie presently serves as the Editor of the Journal of Risk Research (IF 5.35), a leading international publication for research on risk.
Supervision
Jamie is broadly open to supervising students with risk, crisis, and disaster related interests in the following topics:
- Risk management
- Risk perception
- Risk communication
- Risk leadership
- Risk preparedness and resilience
Please contact him if you are interested in undertaking a PhD.