Jenny W. Rudolph is an Assistant Professor in Health Services at the Boston
University School of Public Health with a joint appointment to the Management
Decision Research Center at the US Department and Veterans’ Affairs. Rudolph’s
research focuses on individual, group, and organizational performance in settings
where the social and/or physical consequences of making mistakes are high. She
is particularly interested in the role of mindfulness in enhancing patient safety and
reducing medical error. Her dissertation explored error handling by anesthesiologists
during OR crises, and she designed and tested a crisis management training
intervention to reduce those errors. She is also interested in underlying patterns
that cause organizational systems to collapse. She has used computer simulation
and in-depth case studies to understand, for example, how small disruptions can
precipitate large scale disasters.

Rudolph is a graduate of Harvard College, studied System Dynamics at the Sloan
School of Management as a visiting scholar, and received her Ph.D. in Management
from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Rudolph is also the former
Managing Director or BOTEC Analysis Corporation, a public policy consulting firm
focusing on reducing drug abuse and crime.

Curriculum Vitae

Select Publications:

Rudolph, J. W., Repenning, N. P. 2002. Disaster dynamics: Understanding the role of
quantity in organizational collapse. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47 (1): 1-30.

Carroll, J. S., J. W. Rudolph, and S. Hatakenaka. 2002. Root cause analysis as
culture change at a chemical plant. Quality and Safety in Healthcare, 11: 266-269.

Carroll, J. S., Rudolph, J. W., Hatakenaka S. 2002. Learning from experience in
high-hazard industries. Research in Organizational Behavior, 24: 87-137.

Carroll, J. S, Rudolph, J. W, & Hatakenaka, S. 2002. The Difficult Hand-over from
Incident Investigation to Implementation: A Challenge for Organizational Learning.
In B. Wilpert & B. Fahlbruch (eds.), System Safety: Challenges and Pitfalls of
Intervention. Boston: Pergamon, 189-206.

Carroll, J. S., Rudolph, J. W., Hatakenaka, S. 2002. Learning from organizational
experience. Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge. M. Easterby-Smith
and M. A. Lyles. London, Blackwell Publishers.

Rudolph, J. W., Foldy, E., & Taylor, S. T. 2001. Collaborative off-line reflection: A
way to develop skill in action science and action inquiry. P. Reason & H. Bradbur
y (Eds.), Handbook of action research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage: 405-412.


Carroll, J. S., Rudolph, J. W., Hatakenaka, S., Wiederhold, T., Boldrini, M. 2001.
Learning in the context of incident team diagnoses and organizational decisions at
four nuclear power plants. In E. Salas & G. Klein (Eds.), Linking Expertise and
Naturalistic Decision Making. Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates:
349-365.