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Mechelle Kitchens - Administrative Manager
404-894-1746
Summary Sentence: Join Materials Science and Engineering as they present Dr. Joseph Saleh from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Aerospace Engineering.
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Joseph SalahJoseph Homer Saleh, Associate Professor
Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Tech
Abstract:
The best technology transfer mode comes “wearing shoes”; by educating and engaging students in the multidisciplinary issues of accident causation, injury prevention, and system safety, educators can provide them with a proper safety competence, accident awareness, and safety culture before they enter the workforce. In so doing, they can contribute one small step towards reducing the burden of injury, whether on campus, in the workplace, during commute, or at home.
In this talk, I will first argue that all engineering students should be safety-literate. I discuss why accident literacy and safety competence ought to be an essential part of their intellectual toolkit. I describe the elements of this safety literacy including some fundamental failure mechanisms and safety principles, which are domain-independent and broadly applicable across different contexts and industries. I will then share some thoughts on developing and teaching a course at Georgia Tech entitled, “Accident Causation and System Safety—AE 4357”. Although the course is based in the school of Aerospace Engineering, it is open to all students across campus, and it provides opportunities to examine accidents in different industries, e.g., oil and gas, nuclear, aerospace, and mining. This is an active learning course with little traditional lecturing. There are student-led presentations and discussions moderated (then key lessons synthesized) by the instructor. The students engage with and reflect on accident investigations reports, published articles, and other material. The case studies provided invite a deep reflection on the underlying failure mechanisms, their generalizability, and the various safety levers for accident prevention. The course is designed to go backward in the causal chain of adverse events, from applications and accidents having occurred, to safety principles and accident precursors, then further back to methods in risk assessment and safety culture. One of the key objectives of the course is to enrich the students’ understanding of causality (temporal depth, diversity of agency, coordinability) and to expand their scope of options and decision space for accident prevention. I will highlight some of the key ideas examined in this course, which are useful to the different communities that deal with safety issues and accident prevention.
Finally, I will discuss the development of a safety culture survey for college students and will provide preliminary results from a pilot study. The objectives of the survey were to develop a credible instrument for gauging safety culture(s) on campuses, to identify whether there are differences across engineering majors (and other covariates), and to help inform and guide safety education where most effective.
Biography:
Dr. Saleh is an Associate Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his undergraduate degree from Supaero (now ISAE) in Toulouse, France, a Masters degree from Harvard University, and a PhD from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Prior to Joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Saleh served as the Executive Director of the Ford-MIT Alliance, a multi-million dollar research partnership between MIT and the Ford Motor Company. He served as an Associate Editor of the journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety, and the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. Dr. Saleh is the author two books, 140 technical publications, including two articles in the Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering (Wiley), and 70 journal articles, a dozen of which have been on the Top 25 most downloaded publications on ScienceDirect. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Dr. Saleh has received several awards for his teaching and mentoring at Georgia Tech, including the Outstanding Faculty Award (School of Aerospace Engineering), the Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award (college of Engineering), the Most Valuable Professor Award, and the Class of 1940 W. Roanne Beard Outstanding Teaching Award, Georgia Tech’s highest teaching award; and at MIT he received the Vicki Kerrebrock Award and two mentoring awards for supervising the Best Masters Thesis (for Nicole Jordan and Juan Pablo Torres Padilla). His research cover three broad themes: (1) spacecraft reliability and multi-state failure analysis; (2) analytical systems engineering as it pertains to space systems, focusing on its temporal dimension, including flexibility, obsolescence, space responsiveness, and schedule risk; and (3) accident causation and system safety. This is both a most meaningful and highly multidisciplinary theme, with focus areas across different contexts and industries. His research in this area includes a fundamental research component, an applied industry-specific component, and an educational component.
http://www.josephhomersaleh.com/site/
Reception at 3:30 p.m. in the Georgia Tech Manufacuring Institute Atrium
