Changwon Son, Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University, won the Best Poster Presentation award at the Texas A&M Conference on Energy. The inaugural event featured aspects of energy-related research conducted at Texas A&M with diverse inputs from different disciplines.
“This award was my first experience in getting recognition from an academic conference,” Son said. “I learned a lot from this achievement including interpreting findings from my research and communicating with other colleagues in academia.”
His presentation was titled “The application of safety culture assessment framework into a Bayesian belief network analysis.”
“The ultimate goal of my project is to provide a useful toolkit for improving safety culture in relation to the reduction of risks,” Son said. “Thus, this research aims to shed light on the relationship among layers of factors including human, technical, organizational and societal aspects. It will also provide a method that integrates all those factors for better socio-technical risk analysis.”
Due to the increasing threat of energy industries losing control, resulting in undesirable disasters, Son’s work addresses this challenge by paving the path for his future research in examining organizational and societal impact on the level of risks in energy industries.
Son studies under Dr. Farzan Sasangohar in industrial and systems engineering and is co-advised by Dr. S. Camille Peres from the Texas A&M Health Science Center’s School of Public Health. He is also a graduate research assistant in the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center within the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Department at Texas A&M.
“The Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center is internationally known for excellence in safety research and their annual symposium attracts hundreds of academia, industry, and government leaders,” Sasangohar said. “Changwon’s poster was chosen out of many contenders, which is testament to his outstanding research quality and communication. I’m sure this award is the first of many for Changwon.”