An ergonomic mouse. A lending library of field gear. A Slack channel where small safety questions are welcome.
These are a few ways this year’s UC Davis Lab Safety Award winners keep safety in their daily routine. Across field sites, chemistry labs and computer screens, their practices encourage team members to ask questions, prepare for hazards and look out for one another.
"When you have a safety culture, there is a thriving understanding of the logic and the why, and you have buy-in from your team," said Veronica Thron, research safety manager with Environmental Health and Safety, who organizes the Lab Safety Awards. “A good safety culture can also become self-sustaining.”
The winners earned near-perfect annual Lab Safety Review scores, plus additional points through extra-credit questions and surveys.
Here the College of Letters and Science awardee, Marie Heffern, shares an approach other labs and safety professionals across campus can put to use.
Keep safety questions flowing
Heffern Lab wins Lab Safety Award for the College of Letters and Science — for a second time
This is the second time Marie Heffern’s lab in the chemistry department has been honored as the Lab Safety Award winner from the College of Letters and Science.
The Heffern Lab studies how metal micronutrients influence health and disease. The team is pioneering a new field of “metalloendocrinology” — or research on how metals interact with hormones — that could help explain why some people with diabetes don’t respond to GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.
To do that work, the Heffern Lab operates a chemistry laboratory, analytic chemistry laboratory, molecular laboratory, an isolated cell biology laboratory, and a separate animal laboratory space. It's a very integrated lab, in terms of space and students working across chemistry and biology.
“We run into a lot of safety priority questions, with chemistry hazards and biological hazards,” Heffern explained. “When you’re working in a multi-functional space, you have to look at conflicting hazards and how they would affect the workflow, since many systems are designed for mono-functioning situations.”
The team has a dedicated Slack channel for #safety, to keep safety questions moving, including small things such as how to dispose of an unlabeled tube.
Primary and backup safety officers for chemical and biological domains help keep support available. Each protocol has a dedicated safety officer, spreading responsibility and leadership through the team.
The team also holds experimental methods-focused meetings, where members explain their experiments, hazards and troubleshooting to one another, building awareness of chemicals and equipment in the space — beyond each person’s own research.
"This is exactly the kind of lab-wide hazard awareness we're trying to build,” Heffern said.
About the awards
Each year, more than 980 UC Davis laboratories participate in the lab safety review program, run by EH&S, which feeds into the Lab Safety Awards.
Each college or school presents a $1,000 cash prize cash to their winning lab. The grand prize winner earns an additional $5,000 from Safety Services and the Office of Research, plus the UC Davis Lab Safety Award trophy.
Lab Safety Awards are presented by UC Davis leaders during an event on Oct. 22. Look for coverage in Dateline after the event.
Read the full article on the UC Davis Safety Services website and check out the other approaches awardees recommend.
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