Five ChE Undergraduate Students Represent Northeastern at AIChE Safety Gala
New York City, Tuesday, November 3, 2015
The 2015 AIChE Gala, held in NYC celebrated the Center for Chemical Process Safety’s 30th anniversary. The CCPS is an organization of companies that develop and share safety technologies, information, and best practices. Since 1985, CCPS has focused on faculty training, curriculum and learning modules, and student boot camps.
With over 350 people at the event, attendees were VPs, CEOs, and CTOs of companies employing chemical engineers around the world and representing most of the industries employing Chemical Engineers. The gala honored CEOs of Exxon Mobil Corporation, The Dow Chemical Company, and Eastman Chemical Company for outstanding contributions to process safety. Primarily a fundraising event, the AIChE Safety Gala raised more than $600,000, a record amount for the organization. These funds will support the global expansion of process safety education in the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum.
A highlight of the event was five Chemical Engineering undergraduate students who sat at different tables around the room and engaged in informal conversation with the industry representatives. Emma Kaeli, Heather Davis, Jennifer Langh, Owen Durham, and Chris Lionetti traveled to NYC with Professor Kate Ziemer. Each of these students has some experience with Process Safety at Northeastern University in coursework, dialogs abroad, and co-op. As the only undergraduate students invited to the gala, it was quite an accolade from AIChe.
Professor Kate Ziemer was honored as a featured speaker, and spoke of addressing the needs of, and value for, undergraduate safety education. With seven years of process engineering experience at DuPont before earning a PhD and joining Northeastern, Ziemer is passionate about safety culture for undergrads and faculty alike. “Process safety must be better-integrated into, and increasingly emphasized in, the curriculum so that our graduates know and appreciate the potential risks of processes, the technical basis for mitigations of that risk, and the responsibility for effectively protecting themselves, their coworkers, and their communities.”
Northeastern contributed to the film “CCPS – Leading the Way to a Safer World”. For more information on the film, visit: http://www.aiche.org/ccps/safety