The workplace has a substantial influence on workers' overall health and well-being. Moreover, rates of workplace fatalities and injuries in Indiana are higher than the national average, indicating a particular need in this region. However, despite the fact that there is an unmet need for professional industrial hygienists, funding and support for occupational health and safety programs have been declining. Therefore, there is a clear need for enhanced support of graduate programs in industrial hygiene and occupational health and safety. Purdue University's graduate program in Occupational and Environmental Health Science (OEHS) is ideally situated to provide increased training opportunities for the next generation of industrial hygienists. The mission of Purdue's OEHS graduate program is to prepare its graduates to be professionals, leaders and researchers in Industrial Hygiene and related fields. This program has maintained ABET accreditation in industrial hygiene since 1997 and a NIOSH training grant since 1993. Since 2011, our faculty and students have secured over $3 million in external funding to support occupational and environmental health related research, published more than 45 peer-reviewed journal articles, and received more than 30 awards for their excellence in research, scholarship, and service. Graduates of this program have taken leadership roles in industrial hygiene, occupational health, occupational safety, environmental health, and related fields. Over the next five years, Purdue's industrial hygiene graduate program will endeavor to maintain its quality and expand its capacity for graduate student training. Increased activities to recruit and maintain students from diverse backgrounds will be implemented in the next five years. Our faculty are notable for the diversity and breadth of their expertise within occupational safety and health specialty areas including industrial hygiene, exposure assessment, radiation safety and health, occupational epidemiology, and occupational toxicology. Faculty and students conduct research related to occupational exposure and impacts of manganese and other metals; characterization and risk assessment of air quality, particularly exposures to nanoparticles; and radiation health and safety. Required coursework for our graduate programs covers safety and ethics, exposure assessment, physical agents, industrial hygiene measurements and instrumentation, safety engineering, ergonomics, ventilation and control technology, toxicology, epidemiology, environmental health, and statistics. The core curriculum utilize student activities that emphasize critical thinking, communications skills, teamwork, creativity and awareness of current issues in occupational health. Taken together, the combination of experience and expertise of its faculty and students ensure that graduates of Purdue's OEHS graduate program will become tomorrow's leaders in the field of industrial hygiene and occupational health.
This project supports research and training of graduate students in industrial hygiene and occupational safety; these students become leaders in these fields. Through training and research, this program directly supports the CDC's Healthy People 2020 goals of reducing work-related fatalities, injuries, and disease as well as multiple goals within NIOSH's National Occupational Research Agenda, including: Construction, Manufacturing, and Mining Sectors as well as Cross-Sector Goals within Cancer, Reproductive, Cardiovascular, and Other Chronic Disease Prevention and Respiratory Health. In particular, this program addresses the need for increased numbers of highly skilled occupational health and safety professionals in the Midwest, a region with a substantial amount of industry yet, unfortunately, higher than average rates of workplace fatalities and injuries.
