Jerry Davis, Rich Sesek and Sean Gallagher, faculty members in Auburn University’s Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, have been awarded two grants totaling $1.5 million from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to support occupational safety and ergonomics and occupational injury prevention graduate programs.

“We are very pleased that our peer-reviewed proposals have once again received meritorious scores and were approved for an additional five years of funding,” says Davis, who is the principal investigator for Auburn's occupational safety and ergonomics training program, which received $1 million from NIOSH. “Our graduates have earned more than 50 master’s degrees or doctorates in industrial and systems engineering during the past five years. They acquire highly specialized knowledge in occupational and systems safety, ergonomics and human factors engineering.”

A second NIOSH grant for Auburn’s occupational injury prevention training program will provide $500,000 for an additional five years and be led by Gallagher. The funding will allow a cadre of doctoral students to study scientific principles of injury control and will help support student engineers learning the public health model of injury control.

“By working collaboratively in the department, College of Engineering and Auburn’s Graduate School, our faculty members are able to successfully recruit and retain outstanding students who can fill a wide variety of jobs that require this specialized safety engineering education,” says Gallagher. “Auburn’s programs have produced around 200 graduates who have held engineering positions such as corporate ergonomist at Coca-Cola, branch chief at NIOSH and director of safety for the International Space Station, to name a few, as well as officers in the U.S. military.”

“Dr. Davis, Dr. Sesek and Dr. Gallagher continue to provide outstanding leadership for these long-standing programs,” says Christopher Roberts, dean of the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. “Auburn remains one of a select few universities that is producing engineers with this level of emphasis on occupational safety and ergonomics. Auburn’s occupational safety and ergonomics program has been funded by NIOSH without interruption for the past 30 years.”