DIGITAL EXTRA

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AWARD Established in 2009, the Social Responsibility Award recognizes individuals, entities, groups and organizations who develop and promote practical solutions to social responsibility issues related to industrial hygiene or environmental health and safety. The recipient of the 2015 Social Responsibility Award is CPWR - The Center for Construction Research and Training, a nonprofit research organization committed to the prevention of illnesses and injuries among construction workers. Christina Trahan, CIH, the deputy director of CPWR, accepted on behalf of the organization. Trahan has been in the profession for 24 years, and CPWR has been in for 25. In three words, please describe how you feel about being selected to receive this award. Incredibly honored and grateful. How has The Center for Construction Research and Training evolved since its start? When we first received funding at CPWR to conduct research, there was very little attention paid to construction worker health and safety in building trades. The beginning work in our research program focused very much on surveillance activities—looking for novel and new ways to look at the industry and the workers, and the data that we could collect on occupational injuries and illnesses. The research program then evolved to trying to develop effective and proven interventions to reduce occupational safety and health hazards for construction workers. We've evolved more recently into not just identifying those interventions, but taking research that is done here at CPWR and elsewhere and trying to translate it through our “Research to Practice” efforts into information that is usable and understandable by the construction industry. In addition to our research arm, we have other major efforts that play into our mission. We call these efforts "service and training." Our training program and service programs really grew in the late '90s, and now our network extends to training 100,000 construction workers a year in health issues across general safety and health hazards through OSHA training, to specific environmental training like hazardous waste worker training for those engaged in hazardous waste work. We also have a huge effort in providing medical screening to construction workers who've worked at Department of Energy (DOE) sites around the country. Through this program, former workers who worked on DOE sites are able to receive medical screening for those diseases that are common and life-threatening. These programs are all funded through large multi-year cooperative agreements with different federal agencies. Our research is funded by NIOSH, our training is largely funded by NIEHS, and our medical surveillance program is funded by DOE. Can you elaborate on the five-year program that focuses on nanotechnology in construction? That program is very exciting. It's one of 15 multi-year projects we have underway in our current cooperative agreement with NIOSH at the National Construction Center. It's led by Bruce Lippy, who developed the mission for this five-year project because we don't know a lot about the use of nanotechnology in construction. [Part of the project involves seeing] what products are out there that may contain engineered nanoparticles—nanotechnology in another form—and to categorize and catalogue them. He's done a great job in that process; on CPWR's eLCOSH [Electronic Library of Construction Occupational Safety and Health] website, we have a whole section that is the nano database, a collection of construction products that may include nanomaterials. But [the program isn’t only] looking and seeing what's out there. [It involves] trying to actively watch and see what's being used in this nation with nano-enabled construction projects, and trying to determine if the traditional engineering controls that we know are effective for other hazards a​re also effective in controlling exposure to nanoparticles in nano-enabled products. So [Bruce’s] project is challenging—it's new, it's cutting-edge, it's very robust, and he's learning a lot. It's one of our exciting projects. What's really special is that through Bruce's leadership, he's developed a very positive and collegial working relationship with our colleagues at NIOSH. He has also developed a network of contacts internationally, particularly in Europe where they are looking at some of the same things and trying to get some of the same answers in their own market. So we're learning and capitalizing on this great level of synergy of other people's work [related to] these relatively new products. And of course we're concerned about them because there is a potential, particularly for some of the nano-engineered particles, to be very hazardous to workers' health. We want to stay as far ahead of the curve as we can and see what's going on as these products start to hit the market and be used in our industry. What significance does receiving this award hold for you? My background is in industrial hygiene, and it's been my life's chosen profession. It's a great honor personally to be associated with CPWR and to have our organization recognized for the contributions we've made. We've done a lot of work looking at exposures over the years and communicating those results, and it's central to our mission. To be recognized by the world of industrial hygienists is incredibly humbling. [I also think this recognition will] help people learn about the work that we're doing, and it will help people connect with us. And we invite that through different ways. In particular, we’d like to hear from industrial hygienists who are working in the construction industry. We'd like them to follow our work and see them react to something that we create or put out. As part of our NIOSH cooperative agreement for the National Construction Center, we have a Small Studies Program, which includes one-year projects that we fund throughout the country in addition to our 15 core, ongoing, longer term research projects. These short-term projects look at new issues and things that are coming up out of the industry, and they can be pilot projects, intervention projects, opportunistic projects, or economic projects. We actively solicit people to submit research ideas and to learn more about that program. If it helps people in the construction industry hear about us and find the products of our work and use them to make a difference on construction sites, that's central—our core mission. We want the information to get out and be used in order to make change happen, be it reducing falls on a single worksite through our falls campaign or through a scientific paper or one of our direct publications that looks at the effectiveness of specific engineering controls. If we can get a piece of that information into the hands of people who can actually use it and make changes on the jobsite, that will make our mission of reducing occupational and safety hazards for workers in the construction industry across the nation.