UAB offering course of study in advanced safety engineering

A newly created and first-of-its-kind graduate-level track of study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Engineering will educate engineers and safety, health and environmental professionals across industries in the best practices to prevent expansive disasters like the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Upper Big Branch Mine explosion in West Virginia.  

The UAB Master of
Engineering degree track in Advanced Safety Engineering and Management will be
offered totally online with a curriculum based in experiential learning and
peer-to-peer interaction, says the program’s director, Martha Bidez, Ph.D., a
professor at the School of Engineering. An undergraduate degree in engineering
is not required for acceptance into the track.

 Bidez says ASEM will help revolutionize safety practices
across sectors with a curriculum focused on the No. 1 way to prevent serious
workplace injury and disaster: prevention through design.

"We want the engineers who
design systems and the safety specialists charged with protecting operations
and personnel to share a common language so that system failures, human errors
and other factors that can lead to large-scale disasters are minimized if not
removed from the equation all together," Bidez says.

"Our advisory board members
are a unique group of practitioner-scholars who will share their wisdom learned
from deep and sometimes crisis-driven industry experience with adult learners
in the ASEM graduate program through online discussion forums," Bidez says.
"This offers our students unparalleled access to the most influential minds in
engineering safety."