Fellow Safety Professionals,
Spring is around the bend, right?! It’s been a winter to remember here in Western PA and I hope this finds you doing well. Moving forward, I am going to distribute my message once a quarter. With that, the past three months have given us some wonderful engagement with our membership. We had the pleasure of having Joe Tanterelli share his life experiences with an almost fatal trench collapse in January. That was followed up by a great presentation by Dr. Linda F. Martin on the use of technology in the workplace and how it can aid the safety profession. We graciously thank those individuals for their time and commitment to our membership.
If you missed out on those meetings, have no fear we have some more exciting topics and events coming up soon. Our next event on the calendar is our premier event of the year, our annual Professional Development Conference (PDC). This years PDC has gone virtual and will be held on Thursday, March 11th featuring Dr. John Howard, Director of NIOSH, as the keynote speaker. Registration is open now and details can be found on the website. In April and May, we will hold virtual lunchtime meetings bringing you more innovation and relevant topics. Remember that the monthly technical meetings are FREE events that you can catch on your lunch break, please sign up and join us. Hopefully as the year progresses, we will be able to resume in person tours/meetings but also plan on continuing to provide virtual meetings as well.
Do you have an idea? I want to hear it!
We have such a large group of professional individuals here and one of my goals this year is to leverage that. If you have an idea for a topic, a tour location, a speaker, or have something you have been passionately researching, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I want to have fresh ideas and faces throughout the coming months.
Lastly, I have to take a moment and say thank you to each and every one of you for your continued membership. Currently our Western Pennsylvania Chapter is the second largest chapter in ASSP! And our SRU and IUP Student Chapters are number one and two in the society! That says a lot about our community as a whole and about the educational institution’s commitment to the profession. I would also like to thank my fellow executive members who were collectively able to launch the chapters first ever Scholarship/Grant Program and also implement a Chapter Sponsorship Program over the past couple months.
In closing, please feel free to reach out to me or any of the executive committee members. This is YOUR chapter. I look forward to seeing you at our next event!
Sincerely,
Josh Becker, M.S., CSP
President, ASSP Western Pennsylvania Chapter
Region VIII Deputy Regional Vice President
president@westernpa.assp.org