“Emotions have a vital importance in our perception of risk”

Sarah Dryhurst is a postdoctoral research associate at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. She received her PhD in Ecology from Imperial College London in 2014. After working for several years in Open Access publishing, Sarah moved back into research with a redirected focus on psychology, receiving an MSc in Psychology from University of East London in 2018. Her research at the Winton Centre forms part of the EU RISE project, and focuses on developing and evaluating tools to communicate seismic risk to a variety of public and policy-making audiences. She also researches how people understand and respond to uncertainty about evidence, and the efficacy of common forms of risk communication such as risk matrices. She uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches in her research. Sarah also has an interest in understanding public perceptions of climate change and in how misinformation may influence how people think about climate change and other societal problems.