AUBURN, Ala.—It's often said that the flip side of risk is opportunity, and it certainly seems that risk—or coincidence or perhaps some more powerful force—has played a significant role in Christine Eick's career.

In fact, at least one of her associates at Auburn University suggests that divine providence might have delivered Ms. Eick, now the university's executive director, risk management and safety, to the Alabama institution in 1996.

In September that year, as Auburn looked for a new risk manager, those watching the Auburn-Louisiana State University football game at Auburn's Jordan-Hare Stadium saw the adjacent Auburn Sports Arena destroyed by fire, apparently the result of careless tailgating.

Ms. Eick was risk manager at Georgia State University in Atlanta at the time, though. As luck would have it, her husband, Charles, was set to begin Ph.D. work at Auburn.

“I'd actually had responsibility for risk management for just a couple of weeks,” recalled Marcie C. Smith, associate vp for business and finance at Auburn. “We knew Christine had come to Auburn. The next day I came into the office and there were dozens of messages and one of the messages was Christine saying, "If you need help,'” to let her know.

“She started the next day,” Ms. Smith said. “I always say it was divine intervention that sent her here. We had no expertise in that area on campus at the time at all.”

“I showed up with my husband wanting to go to school here and said, "Hey, I've been doing this for all these years and have a master's degree in risk management and insurance,'” Ms. Eick said. “It was kind of fortuitous how I ended up having the opportunity here.”

Technically, Ms. Eick was a temporary employee at Auburn for seven months while the university followed its hiring protocol to fill the risk manager position. “That was one of the biggest risks I took,” she said. “I left a full-time position to come here.”

But once at Auburn, she quickly dealt with the aftermath of the fire as well as needed areas of improvement she recognized in the university's insurance program. Since then, she has continued to promote additional improvements in the university's risk management and safety program, earning her a spot on Business Insurance's 2010 Risk Management Honor Roll.

In addition to expanding the risk management department's operations, Ms. Eick promoted a 2003 effort to merge the university's Office of Safety and Environmental Health with the Department of Risk Management.

“At the time of the merger, we only had a total of 11 employees across the two departments,” the Auburn risk manager said. “That was inadequate for a university this size, so I developed a proposal where we would increase in stages and got approval for over 40 positions that would be added over time.”

Donald L. Large Jr., an executive vp at Auburn to whom Ms. Eick reports, said the previous separation of safety and risk management led to “a lot of disconnect on the key issues.”

“We realized the more we were able to put under Christine, the better we would be,” Mr. Large said.

But risk management in a university setting can be tricky. There's an enormous diversity of exposures, and a university by its nature is a highly decentralized endeavor with many highly educated individuals focusing intensely on their own research or projects.

“You have to be a good salesman at times. When we're developing proposals or want to make a change in how people are doing something, we've got to work closely with them,” Ms. Eick said. “Which is smart anyway, because you're not going to know as much about somebody's work as they are.”

“You also need to work with them to show them there's something in it for them so there's some kind of buy-in,” she said.

“Christine is a model of building bridges across the university,” said Janice M. Abraham, president and CEO United Educators Insurance in Chevy Chase, Md., which provides insurance coverage for the university. “Auburn is a large, complex institution and campuses are notoriously siloed. But Christine is really a model of building bridges.”

“That's a rare skill that she has really taken to a very high order,” Ms. Abraham said.

“In higher ed, that challenge of communication is probably greater because you have so many distinct little budgets,” said Mr. Large. “The walls go up and people try to protect them, so the more you can talk over those walls, the better. So I have to compliment Christine on being able to overcome most of those challenges.”

Among ways Ms. Eick has helped address those challenges is using staff who can speak the language of those in the university that the risk management and safety department is looking to support. The department's lab safety program manager is a chemist, for example, “so she can be very confident in her recommendations. She understands their language very well and she's very interested in the research that they're doing,” Ms. Eick said.

Likewise, the department's biological safety officer is a Ph.D., and Ms. Eick has earned a doctorate in higher education administration from Auburn.

Improvements in the university's laboratory safety program are one area that Ms. Eick mentions as a key accomplishment. The risk management and safety department set up a dedicated laboratory safety group, inventoried the university's various labs, and developed a priority system—recognizing the fact that some might need more attention than others depending on the nature of the research, the person using the laboratory or the location.

A side benefit of the process was a deepening of risk management's relationship with many areas of the university—”particularly with the sciences,” Ms. Eick said. “We're meeting with the department heads on a more regular basis and planning the training together.”

Ms. Eick also directed enhancements of Auburn's emergency management program and has taken her department paperless.

“We looked like we had major stock in paper,” Ms. Eick recalled. “We had a huge file room full of paper. Then the folks that were working on risk management and insurance all had file cabinets full of paper.” Today, “we have one file drawer,” she said. “Everything else is electronic.”

The result has been increased efficiency, allowing those in risk management and safety more time to get out of the office and interact with the university community in addition to making it easier for those in the campus community to find necessary forms and information online.

“Another goal that we completed was developing an event management system for the university,” Ms. Eick said. “When you look at risk management, one of your risks is: Did your event go as smoothly and as positively as you would want it to go?”

“You'd have student groups wanting to host an event and there's a lot of turnover. So there's not a lot of learning that's being passed on without some type of system. Or you'd have somebody in a college that every five years hosts something on campus for their professional organization,” Ms. Eick said.

In response, Ms. Eick's department reached out to those areas that hosted frequent events, and took the lead in crafting a university event management policy.

“It benefits the university, but also there's some self-interest there because we're not getting the last-minute calls” about how to handle such meetings, Ms. Eick said. “We still want to get calls and the system directs people to us. (But) we're not having the calls of, "This is happening this week, and we need all of this from you in this time period to make it happen.'”

She's also working on promoting enterprise risk management at Auburn. “She was thinking about enterprise risk management and putting it into practice before it became fashionable,” said United Educators' Ms. Abraham.

Working closely with M. Kevin Robinson, executive director of internal audit at Auburn, Ms. Eick started with the athletic department, which she said has “taken ownership” of its ERM program. The athletic department has identified its top risks, developed mitigation strategies and is reporting regularly on its progress. “There's an accountability for it,” Ms. Eick said.

“The (athletic) director has a goal that there will be no better athletic experience than at Auburn University,” Ms. Eick said. “And he sees enterprise risk management as vital in meeting that goal.”

While Mr. Robinson works with Auburn's athletic department on compliance issues, Ms. Eick works with them on events and risk management. Working together, they facilitate annual risk management workshops for the athletic department. “They really do walk the walk,” Ms. Eick said.

Other areas of the university are taking notice. “Alumni Affairs has said, "Oh, we see what you've been doing with athletics. Can we be next?'” Ms. Eick said.

Of course, for all Ms. Eick has done to advance risk management and safety at Auburn, there's always more to be done.

“You're never done,” she said. “But it's really exciting working for a university because you have these absolutely brilliant people working on research and outreach programs. And even though I've played a small role in support, it's really neat to be a part of it.”