Jennifer Cole

Dr Jennifer Cole is an Associate Fellow at RUSI. She was previously Senior Research Fellow, Resilience and Emergency Management from 2007-2017. Her research interests focus on international threats from emerging infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and the UK’s emergency preparedness and response capabilities, with particular regard to CBRN(E), pandemics, flood management, cyber security, resilient communications and the role of training and exercising in resilience.

She left RUSI in 2017 to take up a position of Public Policy Health Adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, then moved to Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018. She is currently a Lecturer in Royal Holloway's Department of Health Studies, working on Critical Health Geopolitics (CHG), climate change and health, and health security, with particular interests in East Africa (Kenya and Uganda), Yemen and Armenia. She is Director of Research for the Health Studies Department, and course director for the MSc Global Health: Human Health and the Environment and MA Global Health: Culture, Society and Behaviour.

Jennifer has regularly appeared as an expert on TV and radio, and has presented at conferences in the UK, Israel, India and Canada on topics ranging from interoperability to medical responses to terrorism and pandemics.

She is the editor, author or co-author of a number of reports and academic papers, including Combined Effect: A New Approach to Resilience (RUSI/Serco, 2010); Chemical, Biological and Radiological Materials: An Analysis of Security Risks and Terrorist Threats to India (RUSI/ORF, 2012); Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance: Identifying Future Research Themes (RUSI/STFC, 2013); Flood Risk Management: A National Defence and Security Concern (RUSI, 2014); Conflict, Post-Conflict and Failed States: Challenges to Healthcare (RUSI Journal, 2014); Drug Wars: The Growing Threat from Antimicrobial Resistance (with Gp Capt Andy Green) (International Review of Armed Forces Medical Services, 2014); International employees’ concerns during serious disease outbreaks and the potential impact on business continuity (with Chris Watkins, Journal of Emergency Management and Business Continuity, 2015); Serious Infectious Diseases: Challenges for Security and Defence (RUSI/STFC, 2015); Internet discussion forums: Maximizing choice in health-seeking behaviour during public health emergencies (with Dorothea Kleine and Chris Watkins, IEEE, 2016); Health Advice from Internet Discussion Forums: How Bad is Dangerous? (with Dorothea Kleine and Chris Watkins, JIMR, 2016); Antimicrobial resistance – a ‘rising tide’ of national (and international) risk (Journal of Hospital Infection, 2016); The Future of Crime Reporting: Can Anonymity Be Offered in the Digitial Age? (With Alexandra Stickings, RUSI Journal 2017); Communications During a Health Emergency (Chloe Sellwood and Andy Wapling (Eds), CABI International, Oxford, 2017); Human Health in an Era of Global Environmental Change (Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, 2018); and Sanitation in the Context of Planetary Health (Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, 2018).

Jennifer has an MA in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge University and a PhD in Computer Science and Geography from Royal Holloway, University of London.