Born in Connecticut, I have lived in Tennessee for 13 years, then moved to El Salvador for high school, then the family moved to New Jersey and then Canada, Worked in DC, Georgia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Mississippi and Texas, Graduated with BS Chemical Engineering. I have worked in R&D, Pulp and paper, and chemicals industries before joining AcuTech. My prior job was helping develop and implement a global process safety program for a multinational company.
My primary role and responsibilities span the process safety management; I enjoy PHA’s and PSM/RMP auditing. I bring a background from work specialty organic and inorganic chemicals processes and reactive chemicals. Spend a lot of my time with midstream and refining.
Early in my PSM career, my manager handed me the PSM regulation and said, here, your job is to make sure we are 100% compliant when we start up since the law will be in effect before we start-up. It gave a me chance to learn and develop sustainable PSM practices so that compliance was build into the way everyone worked from day one, it was a way of life. I remember that as a new process engineer in a one of my first PHA ‘s that I disagreed with a risk in the design and control philosophy and was overruled by the design and engineering team, but recorded the discussion in the comments in the PHA file, fast forward a few years and there was a catastrophic event for just the reason I had identified, and discovered in the resulting investigation. I use this as a teaching moment when I teach new engineers on the risk assessment process. My goal is to help ensure that everyone goes home safely at the end of the day. I have been an industrial firefighter and a volunteer firefighter for 18 years and have seen the horrors of accidents and incidents.
I wish we could instill process safety culture across the industry as a way of life, it is not an extra cost, and extra effort, and extra chore, if you have a strong safety culture it just becomes the way of life. I look for opportunities and ways clients can adapt existing processes and practices to help build a safety culture and process.
What I like, is that I have a job that is rewarding, every job is a learning experience. What I really enjoy is when you can help identify a hazard that was not recognized before, identify potential solutions to problems, when you can share real life experiences and best practices so that when you leave a client’s site they feel that the visit was a value added opportunity.
I enjoy camping, fly fishing (catch and release always), occasionally a little golf. Portable amateur radio when traveling, even earned my Swedish amateur radio license when working on a project there. Enjoyed community service with the volunteer fire fighting in Mississippi and Texas as a way to give back to my community. I finally retired from volunteer fire fighting when I move to Austin.
