Whether it is energy-saving technologies for buildings, or discovery of an accelerating universe, a lot of good ideas are hatched at Berkeley Lab, and word does get around. Thanks to David Singer, who worked as a postdoc for four years in the Earth Sciences Division, Berkeley Lab’s safety culture has traveled with him to his new job in Ohio as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology at Kent State University.
“At Earth Sciences I worked with robust and well-maintained safety procedures, and I was keen to bring some of the Lab’s safety culture with me when I started my own lab from scratch,” says Singer. He set up safety guidelines and protocols based on Berkeley Lab EHSS documentation, as well as on protocols set up specifically for the Nanogeoscience Lab. For his new group he produced a lab-specific primer that supported Kent State’s own Office of Research Safety policies.
His primer is meant to serve as a contract for all researchers working in his new lab. It establishes an integrated safety management approach, which assures that waste and risk are minimized in the course of meeting project goals. Singer started his new position at Kent State last summer, and spent the fall semester outfitting his new lab. His research group will conduct work in environmental mineralogy and geochemistry, focusing on the fate and transport of metals and radionuclides in the environment. His group is conducting laboratory experiments to determine the partitioning of aqueous heavy metals and radionuclides onto mineral surfaces. Singer says he plans to share his primer with the Kent State safety committee and others in the research community to help spread the word and help them adapt these protocols and guidelines to their own laboratories.
