Progress beyond the state of the art. The fellow has improved her international impact on computer evacuation modelling and developing new methodological skills and theoretical insight from Psychology. This has been achieved by the Fellow via developing: risk communication research, interdisciplinary research, writing, outreach, public engagement, media skills, interdisciplinary and international academic networks and links to practitioners and policy makers, industrial actors and the media. The fellow has reached her aim to contribute to European excellence and competitiveness in evacuation preparation and management. The fellow has reached this aim by writing grant proposals to continue her research and apply findings to other areas of emergency behavior across the EU and other countries. The fellow has submitted a H2020 RIA submission ‘HIDDEN’ (December, 2018), H2020 RIA submission ‘PREDICT’ (August 2019, August 2020, H2020 COST action ‘ESCAPED’ (October. 2020). In addition, the fellow has been invited as a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Crowd Science in Manchester, UK (Sep, 2019) and as session leader at the Research Conference Chartered Association of Business Schools, Nottingham, UK (March, 2020). The fellow was invited as an expert on project NEED, a collaboration between UK and Canada to help develop a roadmap for the next 10 years of evacuation drills in Ottawa, Canada (June , 2018) and London, UK (April, 2019).
Societal impact. The fellow has made societal impact by communicating the solutions preventing risky behaviours to safety practitioners (police, firefighters, safety managers, crowd managers) via various workshops, online magazines, research blogs and one-on-one sessions. The fellow has also conducted an evacuation experiment using different emergency lighting systems from industry. The fellow has also helped safety practitioners with advising them on safety applications (evacuation time, evacuation routes) based on research findings (Dutch firefighters, Dutch crowd managers). The fellow has made an international impact on computer evacuation modelling, namely of showing the importance of including social factors (Van der Wal et al., 2020). The fellow has progressed the analyses and understanding of risky behaviors during evacuations with conducting video analyses, expert interviews, computer simulations and conducting an evacuation experiment. The main findings show that (a) it is most effective to have staff guidance with alarms sounding compared to alarms sounding only, based on real-world incidents, and (b) the simulation results showed that the effectiveness of different emergency communication strategies depend on crowd density and that ABM is useful to test new communications before applying them in the real-world. Based on the Supervisor’s expertise in risk communication and input from emergency service members, this resulted in recommendations to be tested in Aim 3 in an evacuation experiment.
