Education

Born in Chicago in 1945, Westrum earned a B.A. (cum laude) in Social Relations in 1966 from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1972 from the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

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Expertise

Ron Westrum is a recognized expert on organizational dynamics in the aviation field. He has made many presentations to international scientific groups such as NATO Advanced Research Institutes, FAA and NTSB-sponsored seminars, the World Bank seminar on Systems Safety, and the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization Regional Seminar in Addis Abbaba, Ethiopia, on "Organizational Dynamics."

Works

He is the author of
Complex Organizations: Growth, Struggle, and Change, (with Kamil Samaha), Prentice-Hall, 1984;
Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1999. 33l pp.;
and of Technologies: The Shaping of People and Things & Society.Belmosnt, Ca.: Wadsworth Publishing,1991. 394 pp.

Lectures

In April 1996, Westrum was a keynote speaker at the International Civil Aviation Organization Third Global Seminar on Flight Safety and Human Factors, Auckland, New Zealand. He spoke to the National Transportation Safety Board on "Corporate Culture and Safety" in April, 1997. Westrum gave three lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris as an invited speaker in 1999.The FDA Advisory Panel on Blood Safety and Availability and the American Association of Blood Banks, invited him to their conferences in 1999 and in 2000. In 2002-2003, Westrum served on a National Research Council panel to evaluate NASA’s program on Engineering Complex Systems.

Recent work

As of 1987, he was professor of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Technology at Eastern Michigan University

Eastern Michigan University

Eastern Michigan University is a comprehensive, co-educational public university located in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Ypsilanti is west of Detroit and eight miles east of Ann Arbor. The university was founded in 1849 as Michigan State Normal School...

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Many of his articles have been published in leading journals, and as of 1987, he was the editor of the Social Psychology of Science.
His recent papers include:
“The Three Cultures Model,” presentation at Symposium on Patient Safety for Improving Florida’s Medical Education, January 2004.
“Increasing the Number of Guards at Nuclear Power Plants,” Risk Analysis, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2004, pp. 959–961.
“Models of Bureaucratic Failure,” in Innovation and Consolidation in Aviation, (Eds., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004)

Interested in unidentified flying object

Unidentified flying object

A term originally coined by the military, an unidentified flying object is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object...

 reports, Westrum was a MUFON consultant.

Westrum is said to be a frequent critic of CSICOP and other skeptical organizations.

Honors

He was the Scientist Guest of Honor at ConFusion XXX (January 23–25, 2004).

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