Dates: Apr 20, 2021
ioMosaic is excited to announce that the Safety and Health Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has awarded Dr. Georges A. Melhem, PH.D., FAIChE, President & CEO of ioMosaic, the 2020 Norton H. Walton/Russell L. Miller Award in Safety/Loss Prevention. This prestigious award recognizes outstanding achievements in and contributions to chemical engineering in the fields of loss prevention, safety, and health. It’s objectives are to encourage the continuation of such contributions and to enhance the visibility, recognition, and value of the Safety and Health Division within AIChE. The award is named for Norton H. Walton, Director of Loss Prevention at Atlantic Refining Company, who organized the first AIChE Air and Ammonia Plant Safety Symposium in 1957. Also, Russell L. Miller, Director of Safety & Loss Prevention at Monsanto Company, and Bill Doyle, Chief Chemical Engineer, Factory Insurance Association, who both organized the first AIChE Loss Prevention Symposium in 1967, share the award's name. Since 1987, only 25 recipients have been recognized with this award. View the full list of past winners and more about the award. Dr. Melhem is internationally renowned in the areas of pressure relief and flare systems design, chemical reaction systems, process safety, and risk analysis. As the founder of ioMosaic, he has over 30 years of engineering and process safety experience and has dedicated much of his career to the betterment of process safety and is humbled to have been recognized for this honor. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Melhem!
I was asked by the selection committee to say a few words about my experiences in process safety and to keep it reasonably short. I thought perhaps I should prepare some written notes because if I start talking about process safety, it is not going to be reasonably short! I got into process safety and risk management in 1988 after I was recruited to join the Arthur D. Little EHS group by Dr. Elizabeth Drake, who was a pioneer in LNG safety at the time and an active member of CCPS. Arthur D. Little may have been one of the founding members of CCPS in 1985 or became an active member shortly thereafter. You may all remember that CCPS was formed shortly after the Bhopal tragedy in 1984 and that Arthur D. Little himself was instrumental to the development of chemical engineering as a discipline. I was invited to attend my first DIERS meeting in 1992. Almost everyone in Liz Drake’s group was a skilled EHS professional and I learned a lot. I spent 14 years at Arthur D. Little and rose through the ranks. During those 14 years, while working on various aspects of process safety and risk management, I can say without a doubt that I was not bored for one single second. Process safety is never boring. I did not realize until much later during my tenure at Arthur D. Little that Process Safety was truly an “Apex Discipline”. You probably do not hear that often...
Read Dr. Melhem's full acceptance speech.