Camille Peres (NRC): 9:10 AM - 10:10 AM
Title: Human Factors, Safety, and Academic Laboratories: The Risks of Really Cool Stuff
Abstract: Academic laboratories carry a distinctive safety risk profile: the people running the equipment are, by design, still learning how to run the equipment. Add to that the fact that they're often working with genuinely novel, cutting-edge techniques and materials — the "really cool stuff" that drew them to the lab in the first place — and you get a combination that human factors research has long flagged as dangerous. Excitement and novelty compete directly with attention to procedure; safety protocols that can feel like friction on the way to an interesting result get forgotten, taught in passing, or quietly set aside. This talk draws on human factors and human systems integration research across high-risk industries — process safety, disaster response, nuclear operations — to explain why this combination of undertrained enthusiasm is a predictable, systemic risk rather than a matter of individual carelessness, and what that reframing means for how academic labs can approach the design of their procedures, interfaces, and supervision. The goal is not to dampen the excitement that makes cutting-edge research worth doing, but to show how safety can be built into the structure of the work itself, so it survives contact with a genuinely exciting result.
Han Xia (Eli Lilly and Company): 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Title: Heat, Risk, and Control: Thermal Hazard Management in R&D labs and Manufacturing
Abstract: Process safety in pharmaceutical development and manufacturing and the wider chemical industry demands rigorous, systematic approaches to two of the most consequential hazard categories encountered across the development lifecycle: thermal runaway and combustible dust explosions. This presentation reports the findings of a broad survey of pharma industry best practices in thermal hazard management — spanning early-stage laboratory screening through pilot and commercial manufacturing scale — and highlights the key themes, gaps, and recommendations that emerge from that survey. This presentation describes these findings in detail and provides a comprehensive framework for integrating thermal hazard assessment into the pharmaceutical development workflow from the earliest stages of chemistry design. In the context of thermal hazard assessment, we will introduce a novel risk prioritization methodology developed at Eli Lilly, termed the Lilly Energy Density (LED) function. This approach provides a systematic framework for evaluating the risk associated with thermal decomposition events and for prioritizing the sequence and scope of safety testing and evaluation activities. The LED enables development teams to make more informed, risk-proportionate decisions about which materials and processes require urgent thermal hazard evaluation, and which present sufficiently low risk to proceed without additional testing burden. The theoretical basis, practical implementation, and illustrative case examples of the LED function are presented and discussed.
Title: Human Factors, Safety, and Academic Laboratories: The Risks of Really Cool Stuff
Abstract: Academic laboratories carry a distinctive safety risk profile: the people running the equipment are, by design, still learning how to run the equipment. Add to that the fact that they're often working with genuinely novel, cutting-edge techniques and materials — the "really cool stuff" that drew them to the lab in the first place — and you get a combination that human factors research has long flagged as dangerous. Excitement and novelty compete directly with attention to procedure; safety protocols that can feel like friction on the way to an interesting result get forgotten, taught in passing, or quietly set aside. This talk draws on human factors and human systems integration research across high-risk industries — process safety, disaster response, nuclear operations — to explain why this combination of undertrained enthusiasm is a predictable, systemic risk rather than a matter of individual carelessness, and what that reframing means for how academic labs can approach the design of their procedures, interfaces, and supervision. The goal is not to dampen the excitement that makes cutting-edge research worth doing, but to show how safety can be built into the structure of the work itself, so it survives contact with a genuinely exciting result.
Han Xia (Eli Lilly and Company): 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Title: Heat, Risk, and Control: Thermal Hazard Management in R&D labs and Manufacturing
Abstract: Process safety in pharmaceutical development and manufacturing and the wider chemical industry demands rigorous, systematic approaches to two of the most consequential hazard categories encountered across the development lifecycle: thermal runaway and combustible dust explosions. This presentation reports the findings of a broad survey of pharma industry best practices in thermal hazard management — spanning early-stage laboratory screening through pilot and commercial manufacturing scale — and highlights the key themes, gaps, and recommendations that emerge from that survey. This presentation describes these findings in detail and provides a comprehensive framework for integrating thermal hazard assessment into the pharmaceutical development workflow from the earliest stages of chemistry design. In the context of thermal hazard assessment, we will introduce a novel risk prioritization methodology developed at Eli Lilly, termed the Lilly Energy Density (LED) function. This approach provides a systematic framework for evaluating the risk associated with thermal decomposition events and for prioritizing the sequence and scope of safety testing and evaluation activities. The LED enables development teams to make more informed, risk-proportionate decisions about which materials and processes require urgent thermal hazard evaluation, and which present sufficiently low risk to proceed without additional testing burden. The theoretical basis, practical implementation, and illustrative case examples of the LED function are presented and discussed.
| Building: | Chemistry Dow Lab |
|---|---|
| Event Type: | Workshop / Seminar |
| Tags: | Chemistry |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from Department of Chemistry |
