Process safety specialist Ming Yang wants industry to design for resilience and incident recovery as well as safe operations cen.acs.org/safety/in…

Ming Yang has lots of experience teaching people about safety from very basic concepts. When he arrived at Nazarbayev University, in Kazakhstan, in 2017, he became the first professor to teach chemical process safety to undergraduate engineering students at the school. Before then, students had been given basic protective equipment such as goggles, but that was about the extent of their health and safety training. When Yang ventured out of the lab to do research in Kazakhstan’s growing petrochemical industry, he realized that process safety was only just emerging there, too, and he found that businesses were initially reluctant to cooperate with him. Yang moved to Delft University of Technology in June 2020 to join a new initiative to improve chemical process safety management. He is developing a software tool to continuously assess system resilience and safety. Through this work and collaborations with industry and government, Yang hopes to get people outside his field to respect safety research as they would any other scientific pursuit.