Emily Wells

• PhD Student at Carnegie Mellon University

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the complex relationship between risk perception and decision-making, impacting individuals and policymakers. This relationship can be better understood through the principles of the Secondary risk theory, which offers a valuable framework for evaluating both primary and secondary risks inherent in their decisions,...

Technology innovation is inherently uncertain. The risk–benefit divide for such innovation is a classical debate within scholarly literature and is often framed on a monetary scale where innovation approval is granted if benefit outweighs risk. However, such discussion leaves out a critical yet subjective vein of discussion within the innovation ev...

Many efforts to predict the impact of COVID-19 on hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) utilization, and mortality rely on age and comorbidities. These predictions are foundational to learning, policymaking, and planning for the pandemic, and therefore understanding the relationship between age, comorbidities, and health outcomes is critical t...

Global energy demand is increasing due to global development initiatives and steady population growth. The US Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2017 (IEO 2017) projects that the world energy consumption will raise from approximately 575 quadrillion Btu in 2015 to 736 Btu by 2040—an increase of 28% (IEO 2017). Fossil f...

Resilience is increasingly recognized as a factor that improves the functioning and performance of individuals and communities; however, it is underexamined in smaller groups or teams. We performed a comprehensive literature review to examine how resilience is defined, measured and used in small teams. Additionally, we evaluated the effectiveness o...

Much is known about the effects of risk on behavior and communication, yet little research has considered how these risk influence modes of cultural and cognitive processing dynamics that underlie public perceptions, communications, and social in(action). This article presents a psychological model of risk communications that demonstrates how cogni...

Emerging technologies research often covers various perspectives in disciplines and research areas ranging from hard sciences, engineering, policymaking, and sociology. However, the interrelationship between these different disciplinary domains, particularly the physical and social sciences, often occurs many years after a technology has matured an...

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to revolutionize the exchange of information and money through blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Despite the promise of such underlying technologies, their reliance upon distributed consensus processes to approve software updates raises the potential for governance failures to destabilize a given cr...

To complement risk assessment, large organizations need to be resilient in order to maintain critical functioning in the face of uncertain future threats (whether the threat is environmental, cyber, security-related, social, etc.). Given the complexity of both large organizations and future threat space, it is challenging to enact programs and prot...

As the Defense Department evaluates the implementation of blockchain technologies, proactively developing related governance now will help ensure that their long-term impacts are consistent with the military’s needs and missions.