(49c) Improving Scientific and Risk Public Communication of Process Safety Incidents for Chemical Engineering Undergraduates

Today’s climate of scientific skepticism and confusion makes it clear that the ability of scientists and engineers to clearly, simply, and effectively communicate science, risk, and safety is not only incredibly important but generally underdeveloped. A likely avenue for this type of skill building would during an engineer’s undergraduate education. With a similar eye to the needs of modern chemical engineering, and in accordance with U.S. Chemical Safety Board recommendations over the past decade, most chemical engineering undergraduate programs incorporate some amount of process health and safety instruction into their curriculum. While the incorporation of process safety into the chemical engineering curriculum has been valuable, the standard set of topics only touch on how to understand the impacts of chemical process incidents to the community which invariably interacts with and surrounds the plant (i.e. voluntary vs. involuntary risk, dispersion modeling of toxic material into the community, etc.). Chemical process health and safety, however, is a uniquely advantageous class to teach students how to communicate technical information that is immediately relevant to the daily life of a “layperson.” In this work, we develop a class module that takes advantage of expertise in other departments such as communication, risk management, and science literacy to teach undergraduate chemical engineers to discuss a prior (real-life) chemical process incident with a mock town hall. The town hall is comprised of both those with and without domain-specific expertise, and the town hall participants are asked to act as members of the effected community. The students are assessed on their ability to clearly communicate the basic information of the incident and the strategies moving forward to improve safety as well as their ability to be perceived as competent, confident, and able to answer concerned resident questions. The results of this work will be used to expand the course module to larger groups of students as well as inform better, long-lasting strategies to teach engineers and scientists to better communicate science, risk, and safety to the non-technical public. If successful, this type of skill building will have enormous positive impacts on the type of public discourse society has related to everything from vaccines to climate change to genetics.