KEY ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Anthropology, World Values, Culture & Safety in Aerospace
Aerospace safety is often treated as a technical problem. But many of the most persistent and consequential safety failures have roots that go deeper than hardware or procedure — they are cultural. How authority is perceived, how uncertainty is communicated, how hierarchy shapes the cockpit dynamic, how a crew from different cultural backgrounds constructs shared situational awareness: these are anthropological questions as much as engineering ones.
This research program examines the intersection of cultural values, organizational behavior, and safety outcomes in aviation and space operations. Drawing on cross-cultural psychology, social neuroscience, and field-based methods, the work investigates how cultural dimensions show up in crew resource management, safety reporting cultures, and human behavior patterns across different national and institutional contexts.
As aerospace becomes increasingly global — with multinational crews, international joint ventures, and growing commercial space programs across Asia, the Middle East, and beyond — the need for culturally informed safety frameworks has never been more pressing.
This is inherently a borderless research program. The research line involves multi-institutional and multi-national partnerships — aviation safety bodies, international airlines, space agencies, or academic programs in cultural psychology, anthropology, or organizational behavior — to make aerospace safer across all human contexts.
→ See also: Trans-disciplinary R&D