Sophie Le Bellu’s current research interests focus mainly on knowledge and competence management, professional training, and the impact of digitalization and ICTs on work organization and nature. She approaches these areas through the lens of cognitive and work psychology. She has experience in activity analysis and research applied to organizational issues within companies and industries, and as such her professional background stands at the frontier between academic and industrial worlds.

Sophie’s PhD in Cognitive Sciences, completed in 2011, was funded by a CIFRE grant involving the French Research Ministry, EDF Research & Development, and the Cognitics and Human Factors team-IMS Laboratory (CNRS-UMR 5218) at Bordeaux University. The research focused on the development of a methodology for capturing and transferring tacit know-how embodied in professional gestures of nuclear power plant operators. From this, she created a new type of multimedia training software which allows operators to learn directly through the real-time experience of experts: MAP (Multimedia platform for APprenticeship). Subsequently, the research method and the training software have been adopted by the training branch of EDF.

Between 2007 and 2013, Sophie worked as a consultant at Dédale and INERIS, specialising in ergonomics and, human and organisational factors for safety, and since 2010, she has lectured on these topics.

In 2014, Sophie was granted a prestigious two-year Marie Curie fellowship funded by the European Commission. Since then, she has worked as a Research Fellow within the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. Her project, entitled “Risky Decision-Making: opening the human black box”, aims primarily to develop an innovative method for studying cognitive processes such as decision-making in situ. To achieve this she is developing a method using the principles of Subjective Evidence-Based Ethnography (SEBE).