Two new reports from the National Research Council (NRC) and Stanford University offer guidance to the chemistry community for how to improve the safety culture in academic laboratories.

The NRC project looked at current safety practices and attitudes in academic chemistry labs; behavioral science; and safety experience in aviation, health care, industrial research facilities, and the nuclear industry. The resulting report has recommendations for how institutions can better integrate safety into research practices.

“I think that all of us who study a discipline for our whole lives tend to think that our discipline is unique in so many different respects,” says H. Holden Thorp, the NRC committee chair and provost at Washington University in St. Louis. Nevertheless, experience in other fields can help chemists address potential hazards in research labs, says Thorp, who is also a chemistry professor.

The American Chemical Society, which publishes C&EN, helped sponsor the NRC study. The report is available at bit.ly/NASreport.

The Stanford report—an internal study intended to assess the institution’s current safety culture—provides recommendations for how to improve that culture.

The Stanford project included open meetings with stakeholders, comments submitted online, a survey, and detailed interviews with researchers. The lab research community tends to be very data-driven, so it was important to have a robust assessment, says Robert M. Waymouth, one of three cochairs of the project and a professor of chemistry. The Stanford report, reviewed by C&EN, will be available at ehs.stanford.edu.

Both studies outline the importance of different roles and leadership in various groups: administrators, principal investigators, bench researchers, and safety professionals. Defining safety roles will help institutions stress the importance of accountability across the board, says Mary Beth C. Koza, director of the environment, health, and safety department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The reports “do a great job of condensing the current situation and describing where we want to go,” says John B. Asbury, a chemistry professor at Pennsylvania State University who has been leading an effort to improve safety in his department. “The path to get there is less clear. We really need to have a discussion of best practices that people have found for getting there.”