Using Incident Reporting to Integrate Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment into the Unit Operations Lab

Abstract

in New Jersey before attending graduate school for her PhD at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. Sarah conducted her thesis research on the production of the anti-cancer compound Paclitaxel (Taxol) through the use of plant cell cultures from the Taxus Yew Tree. Throughout her time at Rowan and UMass, she developed a passion for undergraduate education. This passion led her to pursue a career as a lecturer, where she could focus on training undergraduate chemical engineering students. She has been teaching at UK since 2015 and has taught Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Computational Tools and the Unit Operations Laboratory. She is especially interested in teaching scientific communication and integration of process safety into the chemical engineering curriculum.

Assessing Embedded Process Safety Curriculum Within Core Chemical Engineering Courses

“…It is unclear if students included their "Introduction to Engineering" laboratories in their considerations. Regardless, laboratory instructors had noticed the lowered focus on students with regards to safety within the chemical engineering laboratories and have since implemented additional process safety focused assignments within the labs such as mandatory weekly incident/near-miss reporting including focusing on actual risk and possible worst-case risk of the reported incident [15]. Implementation of more focused safety components to both improve safety culture and to expose students to process safety terms and experiences that they will most likely see in industry is an on-going process in the chemical engineering laboratories.…”

[redacted]: Embedding process safety modules within core CHE courses

“…The incident/near-miss reporting assignment is based off an implementation studied by Wilson et. al [14] which had students in the Unit Operations lab submit weekly incident reports which included hazard and risk assessment. This form is being shared with permission of the authors.…”