David D. Woods

David Woods (Ph.D., Purdue University) has worked to improve systems safety in high-risk complex settings for 40 years. These include studies of human coordination with automated and intelligent systems and accident investigations in aviation, nuclear power, critical care medicine, crisis response, military operations, and space operations. Beginning in 2000-2003 he developed Resilience Engineering on the dangers of brittle systems and the need to invest in sustaining sources of resilience as part of the response to several NASA accidents. His results on proactive safety and resilience are in the book Resilience Engineering (2006). He developed the first comprehensive theory on how systems can build the potential for resilient performance despite complexity. Recently, he started the "SNAFU Catchers Consortium," an industry-university partnership to build resilience in critical digital services.