Abstract

As the recipient of ACS’s 2021 Howard Fawcett Chemical Health And Safety Award for outstanding contributions to Science, Technology, Education, and Communication of Chemical Health and Safety, I will discuss the unusual path my career has taken in the safety field. I will discuss the unique resources and efforts that I have been involved with or championed, including the Safety Data Sheet Hyperglossary linked here, the ACS Division of Chemical Health & Safety’s listserv (DCHAS-L), and efforts to mobilize the safety community to raise awareness of the hazards of several chemical “demonstrations” that have injured dozens of students over the past 20 years. With this background, I will then offer a few insights and anecdotes to demonstrate how people ranging from novices to experts find, react to, and disseminate critical safety-related information.

Bio: Robert Toreki graduated magna cum laude in chemistry with distinction in all subjects from Cornell University. He then earned his Ph.D. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he developed new olefin metathesis catalysts (among other notable breakthroughs) while working with Dr. Richard R. Schrock, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. After receiving a highly competitive and prestigious National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, he then went to Northwestern University where he studied superconductivity as part of an interdisciplinary team that included collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory. In 1993, he went to the University of Kentucky as an assistant professor of chemistry.

At UK, Dr. Toreki was a campus leader in the development of web-based teaching and learning. He served on the University's Web Policy Committee and Academic Computing Subcommittees, designed and set up the Chemistry Department web site in 1994, and was a campus pioneer in web-based quizzing. His teaching repertoire includes electronic homework, virtual reality tours of student laboratories, and hypertextual supplementary course materials. His laboratory research interests are broadly defined in the areas of Inorganic, Organometallic, and Materials chemistries.

Dr. Toreki left UK in June 2000 to work full-time at ILPI and launch our retail division, Safety Emporium. He continues to participate in professional meetings and societies concerned with pedagogy, computers in chemistry, and safety. He is an active member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and its Division of Chemical Health and Safety (ILPI hosts the DCHAS-L e-mail discussion list archives) and is the co-recipient of the Division's 2015 Tillmanns-Skolnick Award as well as 2021 Howard-Fawcett Award. He is currently involved in an initiative sponsored by the American Chemical Society's Committee on Chemical Safety Safety Advisory Panel, Division of Chemical Health and Safety, and Division of Chemical Information to develop an open architecture for chemical risk assessment and management information designed for use in academic and research environments. He was Secretary of the South Jersey Local Section of the ACS in 2011, Program Chair for 2012, and Chair for 2013.

In his "spare" time Dr. Toreki volunteers at Gloucester County Habitat for Humanity where he has helped build 24 homes as well as serving on the Construction Committee and as a Volunteer Coordinator and Construction Manager. He continues to teach occasional college courses for fun including "Nobel Prize Case Studies", a special topics course, as well as General, Inorganic, and Organic Chemistry in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ.

The September meeting will be held remotely via ZOOM

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