Starting and Sustaining a Laboratory Safety Team (LST)

Abstract

The laboratory safety team (LST) movement was triggered in 2012 by Dow Chemical's exploration of ways to strengthen academic research safety culture from the bottom up. This necessitated a new form of leadership from graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. This movement has been spreading throughout chemistry and engineering academic research departments in the United States in a grassroots fashion. However, few publications exist providing the details of LST structure and activities. In this paper, we share results from interviews with 16 currently active teams and outline a best practices guide for starting and sustaining LST programs. Interviews yielded five common components that have been identified as useful to establishing an LST as well as six top common challenges. Strategies to overcome these challenges through proper documentation of activities, maximizing relationships within the academic hierarchy, and developing meaningful safety culture metrics to track are discussed. This paper showcases the power of connecting players in the various active LSTs and emphasizes the need for quantifiable and trackable metrics in the next wave of the movement.