Five traineeships in Occupational Safety and Ergonomics will be offered in the Department of Industrial, Welding &Systems Engineering (IWSE) at OSU, to provide educational opportunities to engineering students at the master's level interested in pursuing industrial, consulting, or academic careers in occupational safety and ergonomics, or related areas. Courses and seminars will expose students to various topics in occupational safety, health, and human factors/ergonomics. Students will be trained in responsible research practices and will be involved in state-of-the-art research that addresses NORA Priority Research Areas, such as Low Back Disorders, Musculoskeletal Disorders of the Upper Extremities, Traumatic Injuries, Emerging Technologies, Organization of Work, Special Populations at Risk, Exposure Assessment Methods, and/or Intervention Effectiveness Research. Research projects, seminars, internships, and other opportunities will expose students to several of the sectors the new NORA will be targeting, including agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and warehousing. Students will learn from OSU faculty and experienced practitioners;they will learn about safety and ergonomics fundamentals and about emerging trends and concepts, such as resilience safety &engineering and wellness approaches to occupational safety and health. OSU's College of Engineering is implementing strategies for recruiting and retaining top-notch graduate students from underrepresented groups, and the IWSE's NIOSH-sponsored training program will actively participate in those strategies in recruiting participants for the program. The program will provide Ohio, a state with 288,000 employers, engineers with training to help them identify and address safety and ergonomics hazards in a wide variety of workplaces. Program graduates will become valuable employees because of the breadth of their training (research methods, safety, health, ergonomics/human factors, and others), sector exposure (agriculture, manufacturing, warehousing, and others), and instructor exposure (academics and experienced professionals).
