This talk begins with the anatomy of a threat: what a threat actually is, and how it differs from the hazards and vulnerabilities that risk processes are built to handle. From there, it examines what happens when likelihood becomes genuinely unpredictable and volatile, a condition that breaks the assumptions most traditional risk assessments quietly rely on.
Risk assessments don't sit in isolation: they inform the planning assumptions emergency planners build their plans around, and those plans are what gets trained and exercised. Get the threat wrong at the start, and every stage downstream inherits the error; flawed assumptions produce flawed plans, and flawed plans produce exercises that validate the wrong thing entirely. This is the cascade of errors that follows from misunderstanding threat.
The session then turns to a way of breaking that cascade: using graph-based technology to continuously correlate security events worldwide in near real time, surfacing emerging threat actor methodologies as they emerge rather than months later. Drawing on direct experience, it shows how a live, connected picture of the global threat landscape can ground exercises in what adversaries are genuinely doing, exposing real preparedness gaps rather than reinforcing false confidence.
The Terrorism Risk Assessment, Modelling and Mitigation Seminar Series (TRAMMSS) is a virtual seminar series focused on technical topics related to terrorism risk assessment, and modelling, including blast modelling and response; IEDs; vehicles as weapons; CBRN; big data for risk assessment, security and screening; and associated mitigation measures.Speakers
Polly Copeman is SVP Strategy and Operations at OpenHorizon and a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield University, bringing over two decades of experience across policing, military, energy and critical infrastructure security. She began her career as a Telecommunications Technician in the British Army's Royal Signals before joining the Metropolitan Police, where she served as a Major Incident Advisor in emergency preparedness and wrote the CBRNE response plan for the 2012 London Olympics, including CBRN extraction training for VIP protection.
She went on to lead Aker Solutions' Global Security Operations Centre, covering 50+ sites worldwide, before serving as Vice President HSSE at Aker BioMarine and Chief Security Officer at Lyse, a Norwegian CNI organisation covering telecom and energy sectors. Since 2019, she has worked as a Subject Matter Expert to INTERPOL's Chemical & Explosive Terrorism Prevention Unit, advising on command and control across deployments in Malaysia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Cyprus and Jordan. She also sits on Gartner's Security & Risk Management Advisory Board.
Polly specialises in translating real-world threat intelligence into organisational risk, planning and exercise design, helping security leaders close the gap between what's theorised and what's actually happening.
Who should attend
This seminar is open to guests from outside Cranfield, who may work in academia, research, or industry. Due to the potentially sensitive nature of this seminar series, guests should be able to show that they are affiliated with an appropriate bona fide organisation.Cost
The event is free of charge, but participants must register for the TRAMMSS mailing list in advance.How to register
To attend this seminar, you must register for the TRAMMSS mailing list via the form here.Further information on the TRAMMSS community can be found on the main website at cranfield.ac.uk/TRAMMSS.
