October 4, 2017
10:00pm – 11:00pm
43-105 Center for Health Sciences (CHS)
About the lecture: This presentation will review how a fatal laboratory accident led to the design of a comprehensive safety management system that resulted in a quantitative improvement in safety behavior and culture. It describes the importance of developing leading indicators in identifying early warning signs of unsafe activities and behaviors as tools to strengthen the safety culture in academic laboratories.
About the speaker: James Gibson is Executive Director of the Office of Environmental Health & Safety at the University of Southern California (USC). He leads a team of EH&S professionals charged with protecting the health and safety of the USC community across two central campuses and satellite locations that stretch from the Mojave Desert to Catalina. Dr. Gibson is the founder and a member of the Board of the UC Center for Laboratory Safety and served as the Center’s first Executive Director. He also serves on an External Advisory Board for Sandia National Laboratories, an Advisory Committee for Cal/OSHA’s Occupational Safety & Health Standards Board, and was recently elected to a leadership position with the American Public Health Association (APHA).
Prior to joining USC in 2014, Dr. Gibson headed UCLA’s Office of Environment, Health and Safety. Dr. Gibson served as the Corporate Director of Public Health for Princess Cruises and Cunard from 2004 – 2007 and was Assistant Commissioner for the New York City Department of Health from 2000-2004.
Dr. Gibson received his MPH in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and his PhD in Environmental and Occupational Health from the University of Illinois, Chicago. He currently holds faculty appointments at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the California State University – Northridge (CSUN) Department of Environmental Health Sciences. He has authored numerous publications on laboratory safety and safety culture.
For more information please contact Rebecca Greenberg at rgreenberg@ph.ucla.edu or at (310) 206-1619