(513c) Addressing Educational Gaps for Process Safety in Both Academia and Industry

Members of AIChE’s Safety and Health Division (S&H) have been working for decades with AIChE’s Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) to develop process safety-related continuing education materials for practicing engineers.   To help address the needs of chemical engineering educators, members of the S&H Division help bridge the gap between industry and academia through the Safety and Chemical Engineering Education (SAChE) committee.  One of the SAChE committee’s goals is to help instructors who don’t have extensive process safety experience prepare for and teach chemical process safety examples and lessons in their classes.  Extensive process safety guideline books, webinars and “safety certificates” (available through SAChE) have been developed and are currently in use today.  Integrating process safety system principles, such as inherently safer design and process hazards analyses, into an already overloaded chemical engineering curricula has been one of the SAChE committee’s challenges, and is a "hot topic" today, especially now that the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) added a “process safety” expectation into its audit protocol in the Fall of 2012.