K: I’m a bit like a symphony conductor. I coach dedicated STAR staff, faculty and student researchers from several disciplines to agreed upon strategies. As a director I don’t so much tell people what to do, as I try to ensure that we reach collective synergies and don’t fall into working in silos.
Day-to-day, I participate in activities occurring on both UBC campuses in various faculties and departments. I communicate the nature of STAR to researchers and external partners new to STAR and coordinate meetings across departments and partners. I’m also involved with co-creating research questions and collaborating on existing projects. When an initiative is spread across organizations and places, there can never be too much communication.
K: STAR research is partner-engaged and problem-oriented — so much of what we do is applied research seeking to respond to a challenge raised by a partner. We’re good at working together to ask the right questions. The real art in the STAR initiative lies in the way we work with partners one on one and in larger symposia to map out challenges in a particular area of human performance. This allows us to identify steps we can take together from various disciplinary perspectives to overcome those challenges.
The real art in the STAR initiative lies in the way we work with partners one on one and in larger symposia to map out challenges in a particular area of human performance.
K: Some of our most recognizable work is in helmets and head projection, with applications across sport, health and defence. We’re also in the middle of a process where we are engaging willing academics and non-academic partners to think about emerging research questions in ‘before and after disaster’ situations. We’re trying to think about how our materials research capacity and research based in supportive decision making can help to enable better human performance far in advance of disasters, and long after the initial crisis has received first response.
From new techniques in strategic foresight through better understanding of PTSD and factors affecting community resilience, we hope to build an interdisciplinary hub identifying the right questions to ask and building the right partnerships to answer those questions.
I think we’re going to see very rapid developments in simulation technologies in association with sensor technologies. This will enable us to respond earlier than ever before to signs of incipient disaster, and we’ll be able to respond on the back of rapidly composed and compared scenarios.
