While lab accidents that involved personal injuries or significant property damage are required to be reported by law, many minor lab incidents or near misses are less frequently reported, especially in an academic research environment. However, public awareness of these stories and incidents create valuable learning opportunities and can prevent similar mishaps from happening in the future. Inspired by a near miss reporting system from the Dow Chemical Company, the University of Minnesota Joint Safety Team, a student-led safety initiative between the departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, developed the Learning Experience Reports (LERs) system as a platform to selfreport and share safety stories occurring within the two departments. LERs are short, anonymous, voluntary submissions by researchers who were either directly involved with or witnessed a safetyrelated incident, near miss, or observation of unsafe practices. In this report, we compiled and analyzed 85 LERs submitted by researchers from Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering & Materials Science at the University of Minnesota during 2014−2019. Most notable from our results was that the top three most frequently occurring hazards were spill, fire, and equipment failures. LERs encourage open discussions of lab incidents and near misses through honest, compelling stories among academic researchers and educate researchers to follow better lab practices. For university administrators, LERs complement existing hazard assessment and incident reporting methods and allow a better understanding of the current research safety landscape among the student body. For researchers, the LER system allows them to develop safety awareness at an early stage and benefit their future careers. Hence, we strongly recommend academic research institutions to adopt a similar LER system to improve the safety culture in academia. Here, we outline the logistics required to implement an effective LER distribution system as well as provide the cumulative data in order to ease the setup of a system for others.
The structural anisotropy of layered materials leads to disparate lattice responses along different crystallographic directions following femtosecond photoexcitation. Ultrafast scattering methods are well-suited to resolving such responses, though probe size and specimen structure and morphology must be considered when interpreting results. Here we use ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) imaging and diffraction to study the influence of individual multilayer terraces and few-layer step-edges on acoustic-phonon dynamics in 1T-TaS 2 and 2H-MoS 2 . In TaS 2 , we find that a multilayer terrace produces distinct, localized responses arising from thickness-dependent c-axis phonon dynamics. Convolution of the responses is demonstrated with ultrafast selected-area diffraction by limiting the probe size and training it on the region of interest. This results in a reciprocal-space frequency response that is a convolution of the spatially separated behaviors. Sensitivity of phonon dynamics to few-layer step-edges in MoS 2 and the capability of UEM imaging to resolve the influence of such defects are also demonstrated. Spatial frequency maps from the UEM image series reveal regions separated by a four-layer step-edge having 60.0 GHz and 63.3 GHz oscillation frequencies, again linked to c-axis phonon propagation. As with ultrafast diffraction, signal convolution is demonstrated by continuous increase of the size of the selected region of interest used in the analysis.
The Joint Safety Team (JST) was conceived
in 2012 by the Departments
of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Chemistry at the
University of Minnesota and the Dow Chemical Company as a model student-led
safety organization. The JST initiative was aimed at improving academic
safety through four core areas: compliance, awareness, resources,
and education. Since its inception, the JST has taken great strides
to develop a culture of peer-led safety at Minnesota. We describe
the evolution of the structure of the organization over the last 8
years and the innovative methodologies employed by the JST to educate
and evaluate safety in academic laboratories. The continuous efforts
of the student members of the JST have enabled the organization to
be recognized as a leader in peer-to-peer safety. The Minnesota model
of “inform and reform” is now being adopted at other
academic institutions to develop safety organizations emulating the
JST.
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