Candidates for the 2012 Election of AIChE Safety & Health Division
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For the Position of Director (select 2)
Christie Arseneau
Christie Arseneau is a Process Safety Risk Engineer for the BP. She joined BP in 2011 with over 11 years of HSE and Process Safety experience with PPG Industries, AcuTech, and Momentive Specialty Chemicals.
Christie has been involved with many AIChE CCPS initiatives including participating in the development of the CCPS Publication “Process Safety Leading and Lagging Metrics – You Don’t Improve What You Don’t Measure” and the CCPS Guidelines for Process Safety Metrics. She has contributed to the CCPS Guidelines for Process Safety Auditing, 2nd Edition. Christie was the 2011 Conference Chair for the CCPS Conference, has previously served as 2010 CCPS Conference Co-Chair, 2009 CCPS Conference Session Chair and Committee Chair for the CCPS Web Knowledge Base, and has published several papers in previous CCPS Conferences. She has also served on the Technical Steering Committee.
Christie has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Cleveland State University.
Bruce K. Vaughen, Ph.D., P.E.
Dr. Bruce K. Vaughen is the Global Process Safety Management (PSM) Leader for the Fumed Metal Oxides Division (FMO) of Cabot Corporation. Currently, he leads FMO’s PSM system improvement efforts across five sites in the USA, Wales, Germany and China. Before joining Cabot in 2008, he began his 17 years with DuPont as a research engineer, transferred to a plant site as a production engineer, and eventually evolved his safety, health and environmental specialist role into that of a PSM coordinator, with both site and corporate responsibilities. In between DuPont and Cabot, he taught as a visiting assistant professor in chemical engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Bruce is active with AIChE through the GCPS as both presenter and as PPSS co-chair, through the Safety and Chemical Engineering Education (SAChE) committee creating process safety-related modules, and is currently the Secretary for the Central Illinois Local AIChE Section. Bruce has presented PSM-related work at other conferences run by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and has given PSM-related seminars to AIChE student sections at several universities. He has worked as a design project reviewer and judge for the AIChE student ChemE Car competition and helped develop the current auditing template for the student’s ChemE Car Engineering Design Package (EDP).
He has PSM-related publications in the AIChE journal Process Safety Progress, the AIChE publication Chemical Engineering Progress, The Indian Chemical Council (ICC) journal Chemical News, and one pending publication in the journal Chemical Engineering Education. He has been on AIChE’s Chemical Engineering Progress (CEP) Editorial Review Board for more than a decade.
In addition, Bruce has developed corporate training courses for Inherently Safer Design, Operational Discipline, and Process Safety Management, tailoring them for audiences ranging from operators through upper management. He has led Process Hazards Analysis (PHA) teams and has participated on and led corporate PSM Audit Teams. And, he has participated on teams updating corporate PSM-related standards, including leading a team to help implement a new corporate PSM standard on process technology.
Bruce has been a member of AIChE since 1984 and holds Chemical Engineering degrees from the University of Michigan (B.S. 1984) and Vanderbilt University (M.S. 1986 and Ph.D. 1989). He has been a licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.) since 1994.
Robert F. Wasileski (Bob)
Bob is the Senior Process Safety Engineer at NOVA Chemicals. Currently based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he joined NOVA Chemicals in 2003. His work is primarily focused in the areas of process safety, risk management, and loss prevention engineering for the Olefins and Polyolefins businesses.
Bob provides technical counsel on a broad range of subjects related to loss prevention engineering and process safety. In his corporate role, he routinely collaborates with NOVA Chemicals’ manufacturing facilities on capital projects and insurance-related matters. In addition, he regularly conducts process risk assessments, and provides training on a number of topics including Process Hazard Analysis (PHA). Bob also provides oversight and direction for corporate programs such as Management Of Change (MOC) and Layer Of Protection Analysis (LOPA).
Bob graduated from The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State University) in 1993 with a Bachelors of Science degree in Chemical Engineering. Following graduation from Penn State University he entered the petrochemicals industry as a Process Engineer, working with distillation, catalytic polymerization, and industrial wastewater treatment processes. His professional experience includes work in the Olefins/Polyolefins, Styrenics, and Synthetic Hydrocarbon Resin businesses.
He has been a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) since 1993, a member of the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) since 2003, and actively involved with AIChE’s Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). Bob currently serves the AIChE Pittsburgh Local Section as Membership Chair, and is responsible for creating newsletters, distributing announcements, and welcoming new members to the section.
In recent years he has published articles in Process Safety Progress, Chemical News, and the Journal of Loss Prevention. In addition, he has contributed to several CCPS projects (A Practical Approach to Hazard Identification (published 2010), Guidelines for Initiating Events and Independent Protection Layers (pending), and Guidelines for Conditional Modifiers and Enabling Events (current)).
2. For the Position of 2nd Vice Chair (Select 1)
Roxy Schneider
Roxy Schneider has worked as Project Engineer and Operations Leader for the Center for Chemical Process Safety since 2008. In this role, Roxy had technical and operational responsibilities at CCPS including managing the Global Congress on Process Safety as well as managing CCPS projects on Quantifying Human Reliability and creating Hazard Identification training for maintenance workers and operators. Roxy has also worked very closely with the Safety in Undergraduate Chemical Engineering Education (SAChE) committee and has worked to create various CCPS training materials.
Roxy graduated in 2008 with a Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, where she was president of the AIChE student chapter. Roxy has been a Process Safety Engineer in BP’s Exploration and Production Technology Group since March 2011.
Tracy Whipple
Tracy Whipple has a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and over 19 years of professional experience, mostly in the field of Process Safety and Risk Management. Her primary focus has been in the oil and gas industry.
Tracy began her career supporting capital projects with Mobil Oil Corporation. This included engineering design reviews, project management activities and general project support. After two years with Mobil, Tracy earned a Masters of Arts in Teaching and taught Advanced Placement Statistics and other math courses at the High School Level. After a three year teaching career, Tracy re-entered the engineering world with a renewed focus on Process Safety. She worked in the consulting industry for both Det Norske Veritas and BakerRisk, developing deep skills in traditional Process Safety and Risk Management services. These include Facility Siting studies, Fault Tree Analysis, Quantitative Risk Assessments, PHA's, LOPAs, Auditing and more. In addition, Tracy held a management position at Det Norske Veritas looking after the Risk and Reliability team.
In 2004, Tracy joined BP as a process safety engineer supporting upstream assets. These activities included more process safety and risk studies with a focus on the development of management systems for a major corporation. After two years in a global role, Tracy joined the BP Alaska Operation leading the Process Safety and Risk Team. In addition to managing the team, Tracy supported activities such as using risk information to inform business decisions. After two years of managing the Risk Team, Tracy was appointed the Deputy Engineering Authority, giving her more widespread engineering accountabilities, including the management of engineering specifications and standards. Tracy’s current role is within BP’s independent Safety and Operational Risk Team supporting Risk, Assurance and Learning activities in the Wells Function.