Role
Dr Rowena Hill is a Professor of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences. Her work builds opportunities to translate evidence and research in to policy and increase knowledge exchange between academics, communities, and organisations.
Research areas
As an active researcher, Rowena’s research areas focus on emergency responders and emergency and disaster management. Her interests can be clustered around the facets of collective action, communication of risk, and humanitarian assistance in relation to psychological health. She is currently the embedded scientist supporting the Climate Change (Civil Contingencies) and Adverse Weather portfolio for the National Police Chiefs Council. She is an ESRC Policy Fellow to the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities on Climate Change, is the Honorary Research Lead for the Fire Fighters Charity and is the Chair of the national Academic Collaboration, Evaluation and Research Group for the National Fire Chiefs Council.
Her research interests seek to provide an evidence base within disaster and emergency contexts. This includes focusing on the public, the responders and the resilience structures through which threats and risks are identified, prepared, mitigated and managed. Her work primarily considers humanitarian assistance and the psychosocial support structures offered to those impacted by, and responding to, incidents.
Her work also focusses on wellbeing, traumatic reactions, family functioning, perceptions of risk, growth and resilience. Her work also supports the emergency services in their exploration of opportunities to collaborate. She has participated in national and governmental working groups on this area of work as well as working with individual services and forces/constabularies.
She has worked extensively with the critical occupations and seeks to support them in evidence-based decision-making and collaborative research with academia. Professor Hill has completed many consultancy roles across different sectors to deliver this ambition.
From March 2020 to February 2021 she was the embedded scientist on secondment to the C19 National Foresight Group set up in response to the pandemic. Within this secondment she led multiple teams who delivered close to 60 reports to provide evidence-based quality research findings to decision-making for policy makers and leaders across the UK.
External activity
She has extensive experience acting as an external advisor on validation panels both nationally and internationally, as well as external examining and chief external examining. She also has experience of establishing and leading international course collaboration between academic institutions.
She holds a number of membership and positions within other organisations:
- Chartered Psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society (British Psychological Society; BPS)
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
- Member of the Psychologist and Digest Policy Committee (BPS)
- She sits on the academic reference group of His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabularies Fire and Rescue Services and has also worked with the military.
- ESRC Policy Fellow on Climate Change to the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
- Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council Academic Collaboration, Evaluation and Research Group
- National Honorary Research Lead for the Fire Fighters Charity
Press expertise
Emergency Services
Climate Change
Resilience Structures and Humanitarian Assistance
Wellbeing and Psychological Health