Wilkinson Invited to Present about Safety Culture
March 18, 2014
Dr. Sarah Wilkinson, Research Translation Coordinator for the University of Arizona Superfund Research Program (UA SRP) was recently invited to present at the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Annual Meeting. The meeting was held March 18-22, 2014 in Albuquerque, NM.
Dr. Symma Finn and Liam O’Fallon, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Division of Extramural Research and Training, organized a panel discussion: “Safety Culture in the Context of Environmental Health Sciences.” The goal of the organizers was to highlight community-engaged work funded by NIEHS that showcases how safety culture is perceived and enacted in environmental health research, and to attract social scientists to the field of environmental health.
Dr. Wilkinson demonstrated how principles of safety culture can be applied to working with communities near contaminated sites by highlighting our Metals Exposure Study in Homes (MESH) as an example. MESH took place in the community of Dewey-Humboldt near the Iron King Mine and Humboldt Smelter Superfund Site. Additional panel participants were Dr. Thomas Arcury, Wake Forest School of Medicine, who spoke on immigrant worker safety, and Joseph Hughes, NIEHS Worker Education and Training Program, who spoke on disaster safety training.
According to Wilkinson, “This was a great opportunity to move outside of my scientific “comfort zone” and learn more about applied anthropology, which is very relevant to the community-engaged work we are doing in the UA SRP.” In particular, she enjoyed attending sessions on working with communities impacted by disasters and other environmental hazards, as well as sessions detailing community-based participatory research projects. In her spare time, she enjoyed the cooler temperatures of Albuquerque, visiting the Albuquerque BioPark, and finding “Breaking Bad” filming locations.