Thank you to everyone who supported the Laboratory Safety Culture Awards Subcommittee’s* inaugural Awards Dinner! EHS congratulates the 2023 quarterly award winners.

*a subcommittee of the Laboratory Safety Committee.

Congratulations to Bill Dunne for earning the Impact Award!

The Impact Award (groupspace): This award is given to the person or persons who integrate a positive safety culture framework into their work by the application of people-centric systems resulting in changes to the social ecology of risk and safety within their realm of influence.

Congratulations to Sarah Mobley for earning the Encounter Award!

The Encounter Award (formerly “Influencer award”) (headspace): This award is given to the person or persons who demonstrated a desire to improve safety culture through adopting a worldview that integrates supporting and encouraging people to view risk differently and make changes into the process of teaching and/or discovery.

Congratulations to Ahmed Battaieb for earning the Foundations Award!

The Foundations Award (workspace): This award is given to the person or persons who demonstrated excellence in developing risk reduction systems that fit the people and not making people fit the system.

In order to promote positive change to safety culture in UT labs, the Lab Safety Committee established the Lab Safety Culture Awards Subcommittee at the beginning of this year. The theme for the fourth category of awards was using the ACS’s RAMP model to make a risk assessment about hazardous agents within their own labs.

Quarter 4 awards were distributed in November 2023:

1st place: Abdulrasheed Sado – Graduate Student in Nuclear Engineering
1st place: Anna-Kay West – Graduate Student in Chemistry
3rd place: Elena Ganusova – Research Associate in BCMB

Congratulations, winners!

New lab safety culture award categories will be announced quarterly. Submissions are open to everyone involved in research or working in a lab at UT. Announcements of new awards are sent through the Lab Safety ListServ, found on flyers around campus, and communicated during events. Please email Brian Ranger at branger@utk.edu to request to be added to the Lab Safety ListServ if you are not already enrolled.

In order to promote positive change to safety culture in UT labs, the Lab Safety Committee established the Lab Safety Culture Awards Subcommittee at the beginning of this year. The theme for the third category of awards was lab onboarding processes that promote safety culture: applicants shared their lab’s onboarding framework and described how the onboarding experience instills the importance of safety culture from the beginning of a new member’s time in the lab.

Quarter 3 awards were distributed in October 2023:

1st place: Kendhl Seabright – Research Associate in the School of Natural Resources
2nd place: Trenton Vogt and the Chaple Lab – Nuclear Engineering
3rd place: Chris Howard – Graduate Student in Physics & Astronomy

Congratulations, winners!

New lab safety culture award categories will be announced quarterly. Submissions are open to everyone involved in research or working in a lab at UT. Announcements of new awards are sent through the Lab Safety ListServ, found on flyers around campus, and communicated during events. Please email Brian Ranger at branger@utk.edu to request to be added to the Lab Safety ListServ if you are not already enrolled.