Pioneering engineering track of study to help prevent large-scale disasters like Gulf oil spill

BIRMINGHAM, ALA. — A newly created and first-of-its-kind graduate-level track of study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Engineering will educate engineers and safety, health, and environmental professionals across industries in the best practices to prevent expansive disasters like the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in West Virginia.

The UAB Master of Engineering degree track in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management (ASEM) will be offered online with a curriculum based in experiential learning and peer-to-peer interaction, says the program’s director and a professor at the School of Engineering, Martha Bidez, Ph.D. An undergraduate degree in engineering is not required for acceptance into the track.

Bidez says ASEM will help revolutionize safety practices across sectors with a curriculum focused on the No. 1 way to prevent serious workplace injury and disaster: prevention through design.

“We want the engineers who design systems and the safety specialists charged with protecting operations and personnel to share a common language so that system failures, human errors, and other factors that can lead to large-scale disasters are minimized if not removed from the equation all together,” Bidez says.

“Embracing the entrepreneurial spirit of UAB, we have designed a track within an existing program that is not available anywhere else in the world and meets a crucial need,” said School of Engineering Dean Linda Lucas, Ph.D. “There is no industry that safety engineering and management does not impact.”

Bidez says the ASEM’s advisory board is a who’s- who of leaders in workplace safety, including John Howard, M.D., M.P.H., J.D., LL.M, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Kimberly Scheibe Greene, group president of strategy and external relations, the Tennessee Valley Authority, who helped lead that company’s response to its widely publicized coal ash disaster in 2008.

“Our advisory board members are a unique group of practitioner-scholars who will share their wisdom learned from deep and sometimes crisis-driven industry experience with adult learners in the ASEM graduate program through online discussion forums,” Bidez says. “This offers our students unparalleled access to the most influential minds in engineering safety.”

Other advisory board members are Deborah Grubbe, P.E., CEng., owner and president Operations and Safety Solutions, LLC, and previously vice president of safety-change management, British Petroleum; Lisa Capicik, regional safety director, Brasfield and Gorrie, LLC; Timothy Kennedy, global human resource director, Valmont-Newmark; Fred Manuele, P.E., C.S.P., president, Hazards Ltd.; and Charles Shaw, P.E., corporate safety and health manager, Alabama Power Company.

Bidez says the ASEM curriculum, inspired by the program’s industry partners, will offer world-class education in safety best practices on a worldwide and industry sector-wide basis. Course topics will include risk assessment, reduction and liability, ethical leadership, human performance and engineering design, as well as policy issues in prevention through design. The course of study can be completed in 18 months.

Enrollment opened June 19. Interested parties should visit UAB’s Graduate Admissions page. Additional information is available by calling 205-934-6528. Space is limited.

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