DEPARTMENTS
2020 AIHA ELECTION
Secretary-Elect
Bradley S. King, PhD, MPH, CIH
CAPT, U.S. Public Health Service
Senior Industrial Hygienist, NIOSH Western States Division
Denver, Colo.
To more effectively promote the value of our profession to stakeholders “not like ourselves,” we need to ask and understand what is most important to them. By doing so, we can advance outreach tools and programs individualized to these groups, highlighting how our profession successfully speaks to their values and addresses those answers. For high school students who value informed guidance on fulfilling career paths, improved engagement with guidance counselors and associations including the American School Counselor Association is imperative. For college STEM students who value impactful new technologies, we need to highlight exciting technologies including robotics, sensors, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics they can expect to engage with and advance in our profession. For unions who value creating safe, healthful work environments, we need to reach out to showcase success stories of our members utilizing expertise to solve real-world workplace health and safety problems. For veterans, we can highlight how service to others is an inherent value within our profession, promoting ways they could find a fulfilling service-oriented home within industrial hygiene. As these diverse stakeholders show, we need to recognize that one message does not fit all. Efforts to create and deliver more individualized outreach, crafted around the needs and values of these stakeholders, will require the sustained energy and involvement of every one of us within AIHA.
Michael D. Larrañaga, PhD, PE, CIH, CSP, FAIHA
Managing Principal and President
Insight Risk, LLC (DBA R.E.M.)
Dallas, Texas
The emerging practice of industrial hygiene has required us to adapt to modern workplaces, communities, practice areas beyond the workplace and the worker, and expanding expectations for industrial hygienists to remain specialists while at the same time becoming general practitioners. Industrial hygiene has become a critical component of allied fields such as healthcare, public health, safety, homeland security, and climate change due to our critical value-added contributions in risk assessment and management, emergency response, disaster planning and response, and public health preparedness. As the field continues to emerge, the practice of industrial hygiene will remain relevant long into the future. AIHA could more effectively promote the value of the profession by assisting industrial hygienists at all career stages in becoming effective at communicating both the business case and the risks associated with various decision pathways. In this way, we could take advantage of the principles of exponential influence and diffusion of ideas such that each of us becomes our own advocate to promote the value of the profession and communicate our value to society.
