Dr Jess Miller is Principal Investigator the award-winning Trauma Resilience in UK Policing project, bringing 20 years of research experience, including work in critical incident support and preventing violent extremism. Jess now translates the latest neuropsychology into the reality of operational police trauma resilience training and surveys police wellbeing across the UK.
After a gentle introduction to criminology as an undergraduate, Jess went on to become Director of Studies at the University of Cambridge for the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Lucy Cavendish College in 2003 and tutored undergraduate psychology for a further 3 years. In 2004, she left academia for more ‘hands-on’ work in civil protection, during which time Jess joined the management team of Cambridgeshire Police’s Critical Incident Personal Support Team, training volunteers to support victims and their families through mass and critical incidents.
After a stint working in Preventing Violent Extremism in 2008, Jess relocated her research South and designed a 150-participant strong neuropsychological study to investigate the role of DNA in trauma processing. The research has been published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014, Police Professional November 2016, the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the Journal of Clinical Medicine in 2017.
Jess is now delighted to be Research Associate and Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge (working alongside Prof Brendan Burchell). Her work includes:
- Leading UK’s largest police wellbeing survey (and the first to quantify prevalence of PTSD and CPTSD in UK Police). This collaborative research was covered extensively by the BBC, made international news and has featured in several documentaries.
- Training for operational police across the UK in Trauma Impact Processing Techniques (TIPT), offering bespoke modular courses for high-risk roles such as, Counter Terrorism and atypical digital and auditory trauma exposure (for example Child Sexual Exploitation and Call Handling)
- Producing trauma new trauma exposure management tools (such as the UK’s first Police Traumatic Events Checklist)
Jess also advises nationally on trauma resilience, working with the Mindfulness Initiative (emanating from the Westminster All Party Parliamentary Working Group for Mindfulness in Defence& Policing), the Police Federation of England & Wales (PFEW) and the College of Policing. The project won the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Impact and Engagement in 2019 and is a REF2021 Case Study.
In 2021, Jess joined The Royal Foundation to work on developing new trauma support for Emergency Responders across the UK. Her first book, The Policing Mind: Trauma Resilience for a New Era will be published by Bristol University Policy Press in March 2022.
