Welcome to Robinson's newest Senior Member, Dr Jess Miller.  Jess is Principal Investigator of 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 translates the latest neuropsychology into the reality of operational police trauma resilience training and surveys police wellbeing across the UK. Her work now extends to the military, RNLI and Ambulance Services as well as several charities which cultivate resilience through nature, including Waggle, Surfwell and Veterans Outdoors.

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. She tutored undergraduate psychology for a further 3 years. In 2004, Jess left academia for more ‘hands-on’ work in civil protection and joined the management team of Cambridgeshire Police’s Critical Incident Personal Support Team. This included training volunteers to support victims and their families through mass and critical incidents.

After working in Preventing Violent Extremism in 2008, Jess relocated her research and designed a 150-participant neuropsychological study to investigate the role of DNA in trauma processing. The research has featured in The Lancet 2023, 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 and secondary analysis has been published in the Oxford Journal Policing in 2022 and 2025.

Jess is a Research Affiliate and Supervisor, and Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge and contributes to the ongoing work in policing with the Institute of Criminology. Read more about Jess here and watch her on Channel 4 documentary about The Falconio Murder here

Jess's research was recently highlighted in an article in The Times.

"According to recent research by the neuropsychologist Dr Jess Miller, 48, and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge — sponsored by the charity Police Care UK — about one in five of all police personnel are thought to be living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), a condition caused by relentless exposure to stressful, abusive and violent situations, rather than a single catastrophic event as in the more widely understood PTSD.

Miller found that 999 command centre staff are often exposed to traumatic events, as well as disturbing levels of abuse, while taking calls from the public, and are plagued with guilt about sending colleagues into potentially life-threatening situations, yet they rarely get much in the way of support.

...

One of the biggest challenges for the call handlers is not knowing how each case ends. Multiple times an hour they will be talking to frightened, even suicidal people and experience 5, 10, 20 minutes of extremely high anxiety. Then the police arrive at the scene and the phone goes dead.

The sheer volume of calls means it is often impractical, if not impossible, to find out what happened next, and only in particularly serious cases can handlers request that information. They will not always be told, because of investigative constraints, privacy regulations or strains on resources".

Read the full article (with Times subs): https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/999-call-handlers-mental-crisis-pddn7dcgn