Led by:
Dominick Casadonte, Texas Tech University Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

You can download Dr. Casadonte’s powerpoint file here.

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Resources discussed in the talk:

• 2011 Report on the Texas Tech University Chemistry Lab Explosion: https://www.csb.gov/texas-tech-university-chemistry-lab-explosion/
• 2013 College and university sector response to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Texas Tech incident report and UCLA laboratory fatality: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chas.8b20206
• 2020 Ten Years After the Texas Tech Accident: Part I: A Historical Retrospective: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00027
• 2020 Ten Years after the Texas Tech Accident. Part II: Changing Safety Culture and the Current State of Academic Laboratory Safety at Texas Tech University: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00047
• Dr. Casadonte also served as Dr. Megan Gonzalez’ research advisor for her dissertation “Defining academic safety culture: A national study.” This dissertation includes one of the definitions of Safety Culture Jessica discussed at the beginning of this series: https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/84999

CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS

When an accident like this (2010 Texas Tech) happens, it is a system failure.

Before the 2010 accident, we had a lackluster safety committee; it was a way to be on a committee, but not do any actual work.

EHS now has a much heftier line item in the budget for safety.

Faculty, staff, and graduate students are required to take and pass a biannual safety exam. The exam is randomized each time a person takes it from a question bank of ~250 questions. Everyone is required to take this biannually.

Q: What are the consequence if a faculty member does not pass the biannual test?

A: Taking and passing the test is tied into the HR system. If they don’t complete it, they don’t get paid. We had a little trouble in the beginning, but now have 100% compliance.

Texas Tech does not have unions.

The average lab group at Texas Tech has ~10 people in it.

Now working on developing effective “safety award” programs to use as carrots in the system.

Q: Could the safety award programs introduce perverse incentives?

A: We haven’t yet seen evidence of this. A faculty representative from every lab/work area with a safety concern is represented on the committee, so the test has broad support.

Q: Have you employed any means of measuring the graduate researcher perspective on the changes that have been made at Texas Tech since the 2010 incident?

A: When writing the 2 perspective articles for ACS Chemical Health & Safety, we decided not to include the graduate student who was injured due to concerns of re-traumatization. We have also not really introduced a specific way of tracking graduate student perceptions. Obviously, we would not have a graduate student population who would have been there for 10 years to compare the time before the accident and now. However, it is interesting to consider if there is some way to capture that perspective to see if graduate students do notice the changes that we have made. Things definitely “feel” different, but have not formally tracked it in any way.

Led by:
Dr. Anthony Appleton
Colorado State University

Resources discussed in the talk:

• Colorado State University Research Safety Culture Website: https://www.research.colostate.edu/research-safety-culture/
• A Performance Audit of the University of Utah’s Laboratory Safety Practices by the Office of the Legislative Auditor General in the State of Utah: https://le.utah.gov/audit/19_06rpt.pdf
• “The University of Utah’s lab safety system is ‘broken,’ audit says” in C&EN: https://cen.acs.org/safety/lab-safety/University-Utahs-lab-safety-system/97/i20

Dr. Anthony Appleton’s introductory talk

• Love languages: learning about these can help you communicate better with different types of people
• Think about who you learned research from and how that influenced how you do it
• I learned from key mentors:
  • Communication was one of the most important things about research
  • The importance of building relationships in the safety sphere
• I learned how the building operated and how that impacted the other workers in the building
• At Stanford University, my lab moved to a new building. I had to learn how to interact with the Fire Department, city officials, architects, and had to manage chemical inventory.
• Generation Accident: An important question that needed to be considered after the death of Sheri Sangji – who calls her parents?
• Researchers are on the front lines; the Executive Capacity don’t necessarily know how to help you in the best way – and you may not know how to communicate with them.
• At CSU, was seeking to answer: Who do you talk to? How do you do it?
• Recognized that someone needs to translate between the researchers and those who should be supporting them
• Now have Safety Teams organized with faculty or staff AND graduate students – currently organized into MS Teams and hold monthly meetings to communicate with one another

General Conversation

• Question: How did you find your acceptance at the lab level when coming into this new position at CSU?
  • Answer: Everyone read my title and thought “he’s the safety guy.” They thought it was another compliance unit and they brushed me off. To overcome this, I reached out to meet with people in relaxed situations (e.g. over coffee) and said, “Let’s talk. What can I do to help you? And I can’t get you into trouble.” Also, I answer directly to a VP. In discussing safety culture, I also realized I needed to explain to people that safety is an expansive concept that goes far beyond chemical compliance (e.g. sexual harassment, construction).
• Question: Do you have any suggestions from your experience for fostering safety at the undergraduate level?
  • Answer: When exploring improving undergraduate labs, realized that each lab class functioned as a silo. No one wanted anything added to their curriculum. Now working on a project focused on teaching labs generally.
  • Pay attention to where your student go. For CSU, #2 destination state is California, so we are working to incorporate education on Cal OSHA.
  • Trying to work on updating classical classes. Realize that people have worked on this curriculum for years so it can be tough to walk in and say “hey, you are missing something from your curriculum.”
  • CPT is working on next set of safety guidelines for undergraduates.
• When working to shift safety culture, snag new faculty before anyone else and start with examining your onboarding process. Everyone says they hate their onboarding – find out why and fix that.
• I can’t walk into every research environment and command respect – but I can walk in with a specialist who can.
• All researchers need help – and when they figure out you’re not going to ding them for it and that you are actually going to help, they are much more open.
• At CSU, we designed a single website that puts contacts and safety info in one place: https://www.research.colostate.edu/research-safety-culture/
• When you feel appreciated, you give back to your school.
• Check out the University of Utah report in order to see how the responsibilities of Executives has now been defined by a governmental body.
• Question: Who is predisposed to be a champion? How do you find those 1^st people?
  • Answer: That’s in the conversations. Start talking to committees. See who they identify and respect as the true powerhouses. This will take some digging. Meet those people casually and one-on-one (i.e. don’t meet in the office or in front of senior management of the university).

Led by:
Imke Schroeder, Ph.D.
UC Center for Laboratory Safety ,UCLA

Dr. Schroeder’s presentation can be downloaded here:

The papers she shared:

• 2020 “Proceedings of the 2018 Laboratory Safety Workshop: Hazard and Risk Management in the Laboratory”: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00012
• 2016 “Laboratory safety attitudes and practices: A comparison of academic, government, and industry researchers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871553215000407
• UC Center for Laboratory Safety website: https://cls.ucla.edu/

CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS

• • How was the survey conducted?
    • Worked with other university’s EH&S Departments; data directly sent to Imke’s Team; encouraging emails to complete the survey; stopped collecting data when N is representative of the campus; greatest response rate associated with asking researchers in-person to complete the survey
  • Speak to relevance of findings for the challenges for promoting responsibilities associated with undefined risks (DURC).
    • How to train researchers to think about this.
    • Imke has no focus on DURC, but they did look at attitudes
    • How accepting are researchers of safety policies?
    • Could be embedded with an ethical question.
  • The phrase “safety takes priority” was used here whereas Dupont states “Safety and productivity are of equal value.”
  • There is a difference between the rules and the tools; we use the RAMP model to train researchers to think critically about their work; “push” information out based on need, but also provide resources so that there is something there when the researcher “pulls” for information
  • Should not put safety and productivity at odds; “safety with”… Instead of “safety first, then…”; think of the value-add of working safety and productivity together
  • Safety and productivity are the same problem framed differently
  • Reaching for accurate risk perception
  • Risk perceptions vary from person to person (it’s very personal)
  • We delude ourselves that there is one “best risk perception”
  • Who resolves productivity vs safety? Safety should take priority in cases where there is a conflict. This is our ultimate responsibility.
  • Imke mentioned how big the influence PIs have on research safety in the lab; when a student moves from training with a PI that maintains a strong safety culture, and then the student graduates and moves on to a place with a weaker safety culture, how does that experience translate?
  • If a PI emphasizes safety, the lab is much easier to work with for safety professionals; these PIs think about research safety as training their trainees to be safer and better researchers in the greater research community; the emphasis is on professional development, not just about being safe in this particular research lab; also, I am seeing this much more among younger PIs
  • Agrees with the PIs correlation on safety
  • Does anyone know if any students trained in these “strong safety culture” labs been followed into their careers to see how they do?
  • This would be a fantastic and also very difficult project! What we are seeing is that these “strong safety culture” students are going to companies well-known for their emphasis on strong safety culture
  • It is very difficult for individuals to sustain their safety culture belief system; in one example, a person maintained a safety standard at one institution, then when they moved to another institution, they abandoned the better safety practice even though they themselves said it was better. When asked why they abandoned it, they said that the safety practice was not required at the new institution, so they didn’t do it. So was this an example of a strong safety culture or an example of more compliance rules creating a safer environment?
  • Inspiring a proactive, open-ended way of thinking of safety is more difficult than getting someone to use a particular safety device; extra challenging; Two Categories: motivations via norms and what is incentivized; Norms are important, but incentives tend to beat norms as suggested by Imke’s survey results

Led by:
Dr. Mary Beth Mulcahy
Editor, ACS Chemical Health & Safety

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The papers she shared:

• 2020 Welcome to ACS Chemical Health & Safety: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00010
• 2020 Let’s Disagree About Safety: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00050
• 2011 Report on the Texas Tech University Chemistry Lab Explosion: https://www.csb.gov/texas-tech-university-chemistry-lab-explosion/
• 2013 College and university sector response to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Texas Tech incident report and UCLA laboratory fatality: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chas.8b20206
• 2020 Ten Years After the Texas Tech Accident: Part I: A Historical Retrospective: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00027
• 2020 Ten Years after the Texas Tech Accident. Part II: Changing Safety Culture and the Current State of Academic Laboratory Safety at Texas Tech University: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chas.0c00047

Dr. Mulcahy introduced Edgar Schein’s Levels of Culture discussion within the field of Organizational Culture – from which the concept of Safety Culture was initially derived. Schein has a large body of work out there if you are interested in doing a deep dive. As an initial introduction to Schein and his work, I recommend you watch this video of an excerpt of an interview with him from 2016 in which he touches upon the use, and misuse, of the term “culture” and what we should actually be measuring:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPqz315HSdg

CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS

Dr. Mary Beth Mulcahy’s introductory talk

• The term “Safety Culture” gets thrown around a lot – often times to punish.
• Edgar Schein’s levels of culture
• Texas Tech had artifacts, but not much of the stuff below the surface
• We don’t have a “safety culture” or a “business culture” – we just have A CULTURE. What are we doing? Why are we doing that?
• When seeing someone at work looking off into the distance what question do you ask? “What is that person thinking about?” versus “Why is that person wasting time?” How you frame that question says something about the culture in which you reside.
• Ask the workers why they are or are not doing something. They may have a really good reason for the “infraction.”
• Mining the Diamond: not everything at the bottom tier will lead to a fatality, but is still important to examine.
• Many scientists push back on safety advice saying “That’s just not how scientists work” – but sometimes the question is “is the way the scientist is doing it the right way?”

General Conversation

• I got into safety because as a researcher I saw these conflicts become an “us versus them” and it stops things. Now on the safety side, I realize that it is important to be vulnerable.
• Somebody needs to be the first to lower the barrier and put ourselves out there.
• I thought that because I had a PhD and I was a researcher that the scientists were going to be more open with me. This was not the case at all.
• We want to be heard and understood more than we want to be agreed with.
• Diversity of expertise is important to the safety team.
• Difficult to get at things when their mission is compliance.
• Every time you are dealing with someone on an issue, it is not just that issue – you are also dealing with their past 30 years of experiences they have had with similar issues.
• It is important to realize that mistakes aren’t intentional.
• How do we embed decision-making opportunities into the flow of a researchers’ research?
• Language is important: instead of “this is a problem”, say “this is a learning opportunity” or “look I see an opportunity here.”

By 3:12 PM, we had 26 participants

Led by:
Prof. Mahesh K. Mahanthappa
Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN
2020 Laboratory Safety Institute Graduate Research Faculty Safety Award Winner

Resources Dr. Mahantappa highlighted in his talk are are:

• 2013 Student Involvement in Improving the Culture of Safety in Academic Laboratories: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed400305e
• 2020 The Joint Safety Team at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities: A Model for Student-Led Safety: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00153?casa_token=G5JkBEBA1m8AAAAA:EigG6IHRuj-kBp7ddqiDR11Nmx7-YvFam3cqDbwV7fdB54zjxJm6cogSkjL2QMOUxor3T3CWCJuezIU
• 2020 Learning Experience Reports Improve Academic Research Safety: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00133
• 2019 Prof. Mahesh Mahanthappa Talks about Safety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkTUZMHl4_8
• 2011 “Experimenting with Danger” produced by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALBWxGik64A

Led by:

Jessica Martin

CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS

After Jessica A. Martin reviewed the document “Exploring Definitions of Safety Culture” (see link bel0w), Journal Club participants were asked to spend 5 minutes typing into the chat questions that came to mind when considering these definitions as well as considering the list of our upcoming discussion leaders. The questions shared are below.

Measuring Safety Culture

• Regardless of your definition, how do you measure “safety culture” with the goal of improving?
• Given that incident rates are relatively low and incidents themselves are typically not as dangerous in academia, what would a more positive safety culture look like in academia?
• What do we define as the “problems” in academia that makes us worry about the status of our Safety Culture?
• Do all of the actors identified within an academic safety culture identify the same problems? (i.e. do we all actually agree on what the problems are?)
• If culture is a combination of what we do/behaviors and what we think/believe, for safety culture do we only/mostly care about what people do/behaviors since it’s our actions that impact our outcomes (harmed or not)?
• In a safety survey, we can identify safety behaviors and awareness on a scale and provide actions. How do we quantify and change negative safety attitudes? What advice can we provide?
• Does safety culture really reduce incidents in the research setting? Where is the proof? Is it just an excuse to put every aspect of safety under one umbrella?
• To what extent do we need to measure it if we can adequately describe a group’s safety culture from inside and outside observations?

Defining Safety Culture

• How do you empower individuals (students, faculty, staff, etc.) to take personal responsibility for safety, while making sure adequate training is provided and demonstrated (best laboratory practices) to others in the lab?
• How has the COVID epidemic changed the safety culture of the USA? Have those changes been reflected in your organization?
• What other types of culture do we measure in an attempt to change the culture?
• What are the boundaries of an organizational culture? Are these the same boundaries as the safety culture of the organization?
• How many people does it take to have a culture?
• What are other concepts which have undergone a period of disagreement and then been resolved? How did they do that?
• How (and to what extent) can organizational culture and institutional management hierarchies influence positively academic laboratory safety culture?
• What are the other parent fields and what should we be drawing from them as the chemical health and safety field develops (ex. organizational psychology)?