Mr. Slade Beard has worked closely with the Australian Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department over the last 3 years in the development of various requirements documents and implementation initiatives in the field of communications and information systems to support critical incident response in Counter Terrorism.  He has previously worked for 10 years in the development of military command support systems. Mr. Beard is currently working on a research-based PhD looking at human factors and psychology in the design of critical incident response systems.

His work focuses on:

1. Nature of decision making in critical incidents;
2. Impact of ergonomics and design on decision making in critical incident response environments;
3. Application of military situational awareness, OODA concepts to the larger civil first responder agencies and homeland security organizations;
4. Development of a human factors-based assessment framework for ICT systems in first responder / civilian agencies.