Dr Andrea Taylor

Profile

Dr Andrea Taylor holds joint posts at Leeds University Business School and the School of Earth and Environment. Coming from a background in cognitive psychology, she is a behavioural decision researcher with over  a decade of experience of teaching in higher eduaction. Her research interests include risk perception and communication, climate and weather risk preparedness, and expert judgement. Much of her work focusses on applying insights and methodologies from the behavioural sciences to address communication challenges in the provision of climate and weather information services, and support decision making under uncertainty. As meetings these challenges requires cooperation across disciplines, she collaborates with experts in a range of fields including climatology, meteorology, environmental science, health economics, and risk management. Current research projects focus on examining public responses to severe weather warnings in the UK, developing weather forecasting science and services in West and East Africa, developing climate information tools for water resource management, and improving the communication of uncertainty in warning systems.

Leadership Roles

• Joint lead Business and Organisations for Sustainable Societies (BOSS) Research Group
• Joint lead: World Meteorological Organisation’s High Impact Weather (HIWeather) Task Team on Communication
• Joint lead: University of Leeds Met Office Parternship Theme on Social Science

Research interests

My research interests are in the broad area of behavioural decision making, risk communication, expert judgement, and weather and climate risk. 

Research funding

• 2019-2021 Newton Fund/Met Office (Co-Investigator) Sector-based climate services for water resources (£320,000)
• 2017-2022 Global Challenges Research Fund (Co-investigator/Work Package Leader) African Science for Weather Information and Forecasting Techniques (African-SWIFT) (WP1 User Needs Co-production and Communication) (£7.8m)
• 2019-2020 Met Office (Co-Investgator) Improving visualisations for climate projections (£32,712)
• 2017-2019 Newton Fund/Met Office (Principal Investigator) Improving the treatment of uncertainty for climate services in China (£338,000)
• 2016-2018 MRC (Institutional PI, Co-investigator). Developing a reference protocol for expert elicitation in health care decision making (£369,439)
• 2016-2017Copernicus Climate Service (Co-investigator). Quality assurance for multi-model seasonal forecasting systems (QA4SEAS) (€ 250,498)

PhD supervision

I am particularly interested in supervising projects in the following general areas:

• Risk communication 
• Weather and climate information services 
• Decision making in the context of climate change adaptation
• Decision making under uncertainty
• Sustainability and consumer behaviour
• Role of emotion decision making under risk
• How complex scientific information is cognitively processed and communicated by experts

Qualifications

• Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (D2), University of Leeds
• Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (D1), University of Leeds
• PhD Psychology, University of Bolton
• MSc Psychology (distinction), University of Bolton
• BSc (Hons) Psychology 2(i), University of Lancaster 

Professional memberships

• Priestley Centre for Climate
• European Association for Decision Making

Student education

PhD supervision

• Hellen Msemo: Bridging the gap between numeric forecasts and user needs evaluation (co-supervised with Dr Cathryn Birch and Prof Andy Dougill)
• Cathrine Liontou: Public perceptions of volcanism and atmospheric changes, 1783-2010 (co-supervised with Prof David Higgins)
• Rachel Harcourt: What impact does media coverage of climate change and extreme weather events have on people’s likelihood of taking climate action? (co-supervised with Prof Wändi Bruine de Bruin and Prof Suraje Dessai)

Undergraduate and postgraduate teaching

I teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules at Leeds University Business School and the School of Earth and Environment, on topics related to decision making, risk, behaviour change, sustainability, climate, and quantiative research methods for the social sciences. 

Current postgraduate researchers

• Yuan Cheng