Created by Professor Andrew Hopkins
and Future Media

 
Professor Andrew Hopkins

Professor Andrew Hopkins

 

Key Achievements

Recipient of the 2020 Harold Greenwood Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award – the highest honour offered by the Australian Institute of Health & Safety (AIHS)

Expert witness at the Royal Commission into the 1998 Exxon gas plant explosion near Melbourne

Consultant specifically as an organisational factors expert 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

Over 60 published works on safety, issues management, disaster management & prevention including international best-seller "Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster".

Awarded the European Process Safety Centre for his “extraordinary contributions to process safety”. This was the first time the award had been given to someone outside Europe.

Consulted 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 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”.

 

Internationally recognised and respected

Andrew Hopkins has become the pre-eminent voice in making the upward journey through the rubble of disaster to find those links with management decision-making that set the risk wheel into movement decades prior to an event.
— The late Carolyn Merritt former U.S Chemical Safety Board Chair from 2002-2007
Professor Hopkins is a major national asset. His work on the causes of disastrous accidents has made him internationally known – an element of our national capacity to intellectually ‘punch above our weight’
— Kim Beazley served as Australian Ambassador to the United States from 2010-2015
To paraphrase Professor Andrew Hopkins whose work “Failure to Learn: the BP Texas City Disaster” you should all be reading, workplace culture is not just an education program that gets everyone to be more risk aware and think “safety first”. Hopkins and the Center for Chemical Process Safety have defined culture simply as “the way we do things around here”
— Jordan Barab former Deputy Assistant Secretary to the U.S Occupational Safety and Health Administration.