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. Her research has been funded by professional bodies, the UK government, charities and private companies.  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 the 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 FSE Head of Internationalisation for ASEAN, Japan and Korea and the Theme Lead of Digitalisation and Complexity at Thomas Aston Institute https://www.ashtoninstitute.ac.uk/. Externally, Clara serves as the editorial board member of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering and the external examiner for the project management module at the University College Cork in Ireland. 

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 Well-being, Health and Safety Management
• Digitalisation and Complexity (e.g. Simulation and Modelling)
• Training and Evaluation
• Leadership and Team

Teaching Units:

Postgraduate Level

• MACE 60038 (Project Planning and Control): Unit Coordinator

Undergraduate Level

• MACE 12112 (Civil Engineering Practice)