Speaker Andrew Hopkins

Andrew Hopkins
Professor, Australian National University

Andrew Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra.

He was an expert witness at the Royal Commission into the 1998 Exxon gas plant explosion near Melbourne. He was a consultant to the US Chemical Safety Board in its investigation of the BP Texas City Refinery disaster of 2005, and also for its investigation into the .BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010. He has written books about all these accidents. More than 90,000 copies of his books have been sold.

He has been involved in various government reviews of Work Health and Safety legislation and has done consultancy work for major companies in the mining, petroleum, chemical and electrical industries, as well as for Defence. He speaks regularly to audiences around the world about the human and organisational causes of major accidents.

He has a BSc and an MA from the Australian National University, a PhD from the University of Connecticut and is a Fellow of the Safety Institute of Australia.

He was the winner of the 2008 European Process Safety Centre safety award, the first in time it was awarded to someone outside Europe.

He is an honorary fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in recognition of his “outstanding contributions to process safety and to the analysis of process safety related incidents”.
Speaker in the sessions
- Thursday 02 May 2019
  11:10 - 12:00 How structures create culture
  Organisations sometimes set out to create cultures of safety using the hearts and minds approach, that is, running workshops for employees encouraging them to think differently about safety.
  This presentation argues that the real key to developing a culture of safety is having the right organisational structure. This means ensuring that the people with special responsibility for safety are sufficiently senior and sufficiently powerful to be able to discharge their responsibilities effectively. This requires a relatively centralised organisation. This is illustrated using the Columbia space shuttle accident. The presentation includes a case study of BP, looking at its organisational structure before and after the Deepwater Horizon accident.