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Lab safety: New and noteworthy

Provides chemical safety information resources and search strategies for students, faculty, and staff working in a lab.

About this guide

The purpose of this guide is to help chemists and chemical engineers RAMP (Recognize, Assess, and Minimize Risks of Hazards, and to Prepare for emergencies) up before going to the lab. Please see Stanford's Department of Environmental Health and Safety website for official information about Stanford's policies, procedures, and training.

Materials in this guide complement resources provided on Stanford's EH&S website.  The search strategies page includes key resources plus search tips to find commonly needed types of chemical safety information. Please contact me if you need help.     

Fostering a safety culture in Stanford labs

"PI’s are the single most important element for developing and sustaining a strong, proactive laboratory safety culture and must clearly communicate and reinforce to everyone within their groups that safety within their research laboratory is a top priority and define roles, responsibilities, authority and accountability for safety within their laboratory."  Read more - A report on Advancing Safety Culture in the University Laboratory (2016)

New

Search the Chemical Safety Library: https://safescience.cas.org/

About: "The Chemical Safety Library, a database created for chemists to share information about hazardous reactions, will be moving to CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society.  The library was originally developed by the Pistoia Alliance, which brings together life sciences industry stakeholders to address R&D challenges. Launched in 2017, the library now has more than 1,000 registered users and information from more than 140 incidents. Users can submit information to the library confidentially, and the data are freely available to the public and uploaded to PubChem, an open chemistry database supported by the National Institutes of Health. As CAS becomes host and developer of the Chemical Safety Library, it “will continue to be a free resource for the entire chemical community, enhanced with a new deposition and search interface developed by CAS,” CAS and Pistoia say in a joint statement." Source: Kemsley, Jyllian. Hazardous reactions database moving to CAS. C&EN, June 23,2020. (accessed 2020-09-06).

Noteworthy - Lab safety videos from JoVE