Dr. David Michaels will present the opening keynote—entitled Safety is the Key to Operational Excellence—on the second day of the SafeStart Human Factors Conference in Nashville this November.

Dr. Michaels was the longest-serving Assistant Secretary in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s history. He is a professor of environmental and occupational health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health of George Washington University. He holds an MPH (Master of Public Health) and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

In his keynote session, he’ll take a look back at OSHA’s approach to safety and health over the last decade while noting that safety management and operational excellence are intimately linked. The trends in injuries and catastrophic events are evidence that production is not being managed correctly in business. Dr. Michaels will discuss how to apply recent lessons in safety and health to improve operational performance and to prevent worker injuries in the future.

Since leaving OSHA and returning to academia, much of Dr. Michaels’s work has been focused on the relationship of operational excellence and workplace safety and health. To discover more on this subject, read his article Operational Excellence and Safety Management: Reflections From the Longest Serving Administrator of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration published by the International Labour Organization.

You can also learn more about his perspective on operational safety by reading “7 Ways to Improve Operations Without Sacrificing Worker Safety” in Harvard Business Review. 

Don’t miss your chance to see him present in person at the SafeStart Human Factors Conference this November.