All, I wanted to let people know of a great learning opportunity coming up at the San Diego ACS national meeting in March. Working with Ralph Stuart and Sammye Sigmann, we have arranged for Chris Boylan from DNV to facilitate a 3 hour introduction to a risk assessment tool know as the bowtie method. Bowties have been used in numerous environments (e.g., nuclear, aviation, offshore drilling, among others), and are something that have fascinated me since I learned about them almost five years ago. I find myself inserting them into talks I give and using them to sketch out accident scenarios related to cases I am working on.. Personally, I think they could be a powerful communication tool in the academic environment.
The workshop will present the bowtie methodology, and then quickly dive into facilitated small group work first with a general life example, and then a laboratory example. Our hope is to get a variety of people working in these small groups, e.g. undergraduates, graduate students, administrators, PIs, and EH&S officials. We are interested to see what kinds of bowties the different audiences generate.
