Joel M. Haight, PhD, P.E., CIH, CSP

Professor

Director, Safety Engineering Program

1036 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 P: 412-624-9839 C:814-883-5920

jhaight@pitt.edu

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Haight has a master’s and PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Auburn University. He spent 19 years in the oil industry, four years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and in addition to his time at Pitt, he spent ten years as an Associate Professor of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State. He has over 40 peer reviewed publications and is editor-in-chief and co-author of two large multi-volume handbooks in the safety engineering field.

Mathematical Modeling of Management Systems in a Safety Engineering Context

With much of his career being spent in industry both as an engineer and a researcher, Dr. Haight’s research takes on an applied nature. Most of his work has been done in the process industries of oil refining and gas processing, specialty chemicals, power generation and distribution and pharmaceuticals. His work centers on prevention of catastrophic loss of containment, general injury prevention and understanding the effectiveness of management systems to manage the risk of these types of loss incidents. The goal of this research is to develop and improve effective resource allocation decision making tools that allow industry management to determine which, at what quality and how much of their available resources (human and capital) can be committed to intervention activities designed to prevent these incidents. This work is titled intervention effectiveness research and it includes an operations research approach to optimizing performance of human driven systems. Dr. Haight has been exploring a multi-variant approach to analyzing the impact of and interaction between multiple performance variables in an injury/incident and safety-related performance context. Through this research Dr. Haight seeks to develop a robust mathematical model that explains the relationship between the management system intervention activities and the injuries and catastrophic loss incidents that they are expected to prevent.

Human Factors Engineering Research

Since humans contribute significantly to the outcomes and performance of management systems, Dr. Haight’s research also includes gaining a better understanding of human performance and human error contributions to loss events. His work includes human implications on automated control systems, age-related capacity loss and experience offsets as well as physiological stresses and information overload for operators in the oil and chemical industries. This has included numerous human factors/ ergonomic and biomechanical case studies exploring both ergonomic and cognitive stresses on workers in health care settings, the specialty chemical industry and food packaging and distribution industries.