Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to inform that the Chemical Engineers for Safety Seminars (ChESS) Program has been selected to receive the 2016 Purdue Presidential Safety Award for the group’s efforts to implement innovative methods to increase the safety awareness of our School’s community. The award will be presented on Wednesday, March 2^nd, during the Annual Safety Chair Meeting.

The Presidential Safety Award was first awarded in 2013, and recognizes students and staff who demonstrate leadership and commitment to safety at Purdue University. Since 2013, this is the third year in a row that the award has come to our School: 2014 (ChE Safety Committee), 2015 (Viktor Cybulskys, graduate student in Prof. Fabio Ribeiro’s group) and 2016 (ChESS Program).

As you know, ChESS is a graduate student led safety education program that started in our School in 2013, as a series of bimonthly seminars on different safety topics relevant to the research conducted in our labs. To date, 10 such seminars have been organized.

The ChESS leadership team is a group of 4 graduate students (currently Robert Boyne, Rohit Jaini, Ravi Joshi and Mark Koeper) and the ChE Safety Committee Chair (Dr. Gabriela Nagy) as advisor and safety information resource.

Please join me in congratulating the ChESS team for this outstanding recognition of our commitment to safety!

With best wishes,

Arvind Varma

R. Games Slayter Distinguished Professor

Jay and Cynthia Ihlenfeld Head of Chemical Engineering

Purdue University