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Risk and Decision Sciences

Stephen Unwin

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
PO Box 999
Richland, WA 99352

Biography

Dr. Unwin is Principal Scientist in PNNL's Risk and Decision Sciences Group. With more than 23 years' consulting and management experience in risk management, he is currently involved in issues of national safety and security among other sectors of risk analysis. His client base has included numerous industry and regulatory sectors, among them nuclear power, chemical process, hazardous waste disposal, aerospace, and oil & gas. He began his career with the U.K. Safety & Reliability Directorate, becoming technical attaché to Sandia National Laboratories with responsibility for information exchange and technology transfer related to probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) methodology and application.

He has developed risk assessment methods, particularly in the areas of uncertainty and decision analysis, that continue to be applied internationally. He was a PRA project manager and author of the USNRC's landmark risk study NUREG-1150, and was the prime consultant to the Canadian Atomic Energy Control Board as they developed risk-based safety regulation, and incorporated PRA into their licensing decision process.

In previous positions, Dr. Unwin managed Brookhaven National Laboratory's Safety Integration Group, SAIC's Process Risk & Reliability Management Division, and Battelle's Integrated Risk Management Group. In 1996, he founded Unwin Company, a consulting resource in process safety and risk management to Fortune 500 companies.

Education and Credentials

  • Ph.D., Theoretical Physics, University of Manchester, U.K., 1980
  • B.Sc., Physics (First Class Honors), Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, U.K., 1977

Awards and Recognitions

  • Awarded United States flag by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration "in recognition of contributions made to the Ulysses mission launched October 6, 1990."
  • Awarded a Certificate of Appreciation by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission "in recognition of [Dr. Unwin's] outstanding contribution to NUREG-1150 resulting in a significant advancement in the state of technology of probabilistic risk analysis and a major contribution to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's severe accident program."

Selected Publications

2009

  • Unwin SD, and BA Fecht. 2009. "Consumer Choice and Dempster-Shafer Models of Threat Prioritization for Emerging Dual-Use Technologies: Their Application to Synthetic Biology." Defense & Security Analysis 25(1):37-52. 
  • Wong PC, LYR Leung, N Lu, MJ Scott, PS Mackey, HP Foote, J Correia, Jr, ZT Taylor, J Xu, SD Unwin, and AP Sanfilippo. 2009. "Designing a Collaborative Visual Analytics Tool for Social and Technological Change Prediction." IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 29(5):58-68.  doi:10.1109/MCG.2009.92

2008

  • Unwin SD, BA Fecht, and TM Bergsman. 2008. "Business Metrics of Laboratory Space Utilization." Facilities 26(9/10):366-373. 

Risk and Decision Sciences

Additional Information