Professor Jim McLennan

Jim McLennan began his professional career as an industrial/organisational psychologist, and subsequently moved, via occupational psychology, into counselling psychology, in which field he worked for some 25 years as practitioner, educator, and researcher. In the course of research he became increasingly interested in how people made decisions. This rekindled interest from early days in safety-related decision making and in the mid-1990s he began research with the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade investigating decision making by first-on-scene Incident Controllers. In 2004 he joined La Trobe University as a Senior Research Fellow, managing the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre Volunteer Firefighters Project and working on the Firefighter Safe Behaviour and Decision Making Project. Following the 2009 Black Saturday Victorian bushfires he was a member of the Bushfire CRC Task Force undertaking research in the aftermath. He worked on other major post-bushfire studies across Australia 2010 – 2015. He has continued to research aspects of community bushfire safety, especially householder bushfire risk perception and mitigation. He is currently an adjunct professor in the School of Psychology and Public Health at La Trobe University.