Head of Department.
Lesley's main research interests are in applied statistics, reliability modelling and risk management. A major area of work has been modelling reliability growth during product design and development. This research is informed by applications within the aerospace, and other, industry and is generating new processes for measuring and managing reliability improvement. Methods being developed through this research include elicitation of structured engineering judgement, statistical inference for data with complex censoring structures, updating procedures for reliability estimation and cost-effective reliability allocation. Related research is underway in maintenance modelling, reliability and risk assessment in service operations, analysis of risk in business processes, especially outsourcing decisions.
Lesley is a Chartered Statistician, a Member of the Operational Research Society and an elected Fellow of the Safety and Reliability Society. She is an Associate Editor IEEE Transactions on Reliability and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Risk and Reliability. She was Co-chair Mathematical Methods in Reliability Conference held in Glasgow 2007. She has been involved in consultancies for organisations such as the MoD, DSTL, Railway Safety, BAE SYSTEMS, Goodrich and Siemens. She is a UK Expert on Reliability to International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC TC56 WG2).