Dr Hugo Schmidt reports on the CARES labs tour he conducted for the ACSEL attendees on 28th July.
“The Asian Conference on Safety & Education in the Laboratory (ACSEL) is the premier Asian conference on lab safety and security. Since our labs at CREATE were described as the best managed and most safe in the whole CREATE structure, I was approached by the ACSEL organizers who said conference attendees were eager to see the labs and the management systems. So on Friday the 28th of July, I conducted a tour of the labs. The guests were particularly interested in both the infrastructure (the way we house our gas cylinders in a separate room etc.) and in the management methods. A particular hit was the ‘thruppeny wonders’ – cheap items that create a big increase in lab safety and cleanliness (emergency clothes for people, wallpaper to cover the lab benches etc.) The first lab tour I’ve seen where people leave with smiles and laughter.”
The Asian Conference on Safety & Education in Laboratory (abbreviated as ACSEL) is an annual conference organised by leading universities in Asia to provide a platform for the sharing of knowledge and best practices on laboratory safety and health among universities and research institutes.
The idea of an international conference centred in Asia materialised in 2013 when representatives from the National University of Singapore, Korea Association of Laboratory Safety & Environment (KALSE) and Japan Association of Lab Safety (JALS) signed a memorandum of understanding to organize a yearly conference on laboratory safety. The need for the conference was extremely timely given that Asian universities have seen an exponential growth in teaching and research programmes.
