Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
Education
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin; M.N., University of Washington; B.S., University of Alaska; A.B., University of Michigan
Summary of Experience
Dr. Sutcliffe's expertise is in the areas of strategic management and organization theory. Her research has been aimed at understanding how organizations and their members cope with uncertainty and unexpected events, and how complex organizations can be designed to be more reliable and resilient. Dr. Sutcliffe is a coauthor of Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty (2007) and Medical Error: What Do We Know? What Do We Do? (2002). She has published her research on high-reliability organizations, organizational resilience, and safety culture in numerous management and health care journals, and she has presented her findings nationally and internationally. Dr. Sutcliffe has also consulted with private multinational companies in a variety of industries, and with nongovernmental organizations and government agencies. She was recently appointed by The National Academies to a research panel on workforce resilience that will study and provide recommendations to the US Department of Homeland Security. She has received multiple grants, including a 2010 award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to conduct a study of the medicalization of patient safety. Dr. Sutcliffe has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, and the International Public Management Journal.