Research questions in Risk Management and Safety often cross traditional discipline boundaries. Injury and disease, particularly from work, sport, or community activities arise from failure to manage the risk associated with the benefits being pursued. The School holds the view that technical and managerial aspects of loss prevention are interlinked and not sensibly separated. The varied backgrounds of the academics in the School provide a real strength for setting up teams to work on these types of problems.

The School has three research groups:

1. Risk management.
   
2. Human Factors
   
3. Applied Toxicology
   

Their technical expertise is applied to problems relating to workplace and community safety, transport safety, environmental risks, and emergency and disaster modelling and management. Each group has its own research program in its specialist area but also participates in broader projects, for example, looking at the influence of human factors in calculations of risk, risk perception and communication, and work on the toxic effects of fire products.

Technical research projects are carried out in the Chemical Safety and Toxicology laboratory, the Biomechanics Laboratory and the Combustion Laboratory (the latter shared with the school of Chemical Engineering and Industrial Chemistry). These projects are linked to workplace based projects in the same technical areas which have lead to development of risk management tools and research into risk management systems. The School has developed and tested a range of practical risk management tools for the workplace setting and has a growing interest in advanced quantitative risk assessment techniques applied to major accidents, fire and explosion, and the environmental risks of chemicals. The School is linked with, and actively participates in, three major research centres. These are :

•	The Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (ACERA)
•	ARC Research Network for a Secure Australia (RNSA)
•	Injury Risk Management Research Centre (IRMRC).

In addition, the School is a founding partner in the Injury Risk Management Research Centre which is a repository for state government and industry databases on injury and takes an all-of-government all-injury approach to injury risk management.

The School accepts students into Phd and MSc programs to undertake research in the School's area of interest. People interested in joining the School as a research student on either a full time or part time basis should contact the research coordinator or academic working in the appropriate area.