Dr Clara Cheung

Overview

Clara is a Senior Lecturer in Project Management at the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE). She is also a Project Management Professional (PMP) certified by Project Management Institute (PMI). Before joining The University of Manchester (UoM), she taught a variety of project management units at The University of Maryland, the USA. Clara has a mixed business and engineering educational background. She got a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, MSc and PhD in Civil Engineering from The University of Maryland, the USA.

Clara has conducted interdisciplinary research by applying organisational psychology, data science, and engineering management theories to tackle occupational health, safety and well-being issues in high-risk industries since her PhD studies. After joining UoM in 2017, she has secured over £1.3 million in externally funded research projects as the principal and co-investigator. For instance, she got funded by the Association for Project Management (APM) to benchmark the well-being levels of project professionals and develop corresponding interventions to enhance it (project’s details: https://www.apm.org.uk/about-us/research/research-fund/2019-research-fund-studies-wellbeing/) She also received funding from the Lloyds Register Foundation to collaborate with Health and Safety (HSE), the UK government agency, to implement two applied research projects that improve occupational health and safety of the construction industry using digital technologies (projects’ details: https://www.discoveringsafety.com/works/leading-indicators-health-and-safety-failures-project and https://www.discoveringsafety.com/works/construction-risk-knowledge-management-using-bim). Recently, she is leading work packages in "Keeping the UK Building Safely Program" and "Partnership for Research in Occupational, Transport, Environmental COVID Transmission Project", to advance the technology applications and modelling techniques to better control COVID-19 transmission in high-risk industries. Both projects were funded by HSE. (Projects' details: https://www.ashtoninstitute.ac.uk/about/news-and-events/headline-780719-en.htm and  https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/covid19-national-project/ )

Internally, Clara is the Theme Lead of Digitalisation and Complexity at Thomas Aston Institute https://www.ashtoninstitute.ac.uk/ and the Assessment Lead of Engineering and Project Management Discipline at MACE. Externally, Clara is the board member of the Corporate Advisory Group of the Association for Project Management (APM) and the editorial board member of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering.

Before being an academic, Clara spent nearly a decade working in Fortune 500 companies and led a vast number of organisational change and IT projects that improved product design, production efficiency and operational safety. She experienced working in Australia, China, Japan, India, and the USA.

Research Interests:

• Occupational Health and Safety Management
• Digitalisation and Complexity (e.g. Construction 4.0)
• Wellbeing and Resilience at Work and Education
• Training and Evaluation
• Leadership and Team

Teaching Units:

Postgraduate Level

• MACE 60038 (Project Planning and Control)
• MACE 60061 (Management of Projects)

Undergraduate Level

• MACE 12112 (Civil Engineering Practice)