Derek Apodaca has been the Safety Manager and Health and Safety Officer for the Division of Biological Sciences for the last 14 years. He shared what it’s like to have a front-row seat on world-changing research… and why safe science is good science.
Tell about your background and what brought you to the role.
I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1989. My first job was a lab manager at UCSF, where I managed two Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) laboratories in UCSF’s department of Microbiology and Immunology. Those labs were fairly prestigious: we had just had our chair Harold Varmus win the Nobel Prize. Lab safety was a little bit of the wild west back then. We had a biosafety officer, we had a radiation safety officer, but chemical general laboratory safety wasn’t so big. Our biggest challenge was to try to get people not to pipette by mouth any more. I stayed at UCSF for nine years.
Next I worked in private industry for 16 years. I was initially hired as a facility manager, then took on the role of safety manager, and then essentially educated myself in biosafety, radiation safety and to a lesser extent chemical safety, and served as our company's radiation safety officer and biosafety officer. We built out many, many labs, along with their medicinal chemistry laboratory and their vivarium space. As part of that we were working with agents that needed a little bit more scrutiny like BSL2+ agents. So I became very well-rounded serving that company. Pretty much everything that EH&S oversees, I was kind of a one-man band at that biotech company for 16 years. The company was developing therapeutics for diabetes. We thought they were going to be the next blockbuster drug, but unfortunately our clinical trials were not as efficacious as some of the existing drugs out on the market. Ultimately they decided that they wanted to close down the laboratories.
So I took the position of health and safety officer and facilities director at UC Berkeley for Biosciences Divisional Services, which supports Integrative Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and now Neurobiology as well. And I've been back at Cal for almost 14 years.
It's interesting to come back as a staff person when you’ve been a student. I almost feel like a caretaker, ushering in the next generation of folks to learn. And maybe they’ll come back to Cal, but hopefully they'll also spread their wings and go out and do great things as well.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
When I go into a lab and explain the way things should be done in a safe manner, I see it as an educational opportunity, because the students we're training may or may not go into academia. They may go into biotech or industry. We're training them as a holistic person to go out into that environment. So I think of this safety role as part of educating them properly. If safety groundwork isn’t laid, I don't think we’ve done our job fully as an educational institution.
Another thing I like to do: when I do new employee orientations, I often tell folks that you come into the building with 10 fingers and toes and we want you to leave that way as well. We want you to leave as a whole person. And we don't want you to take pathogens home to your family or things like that. We want to leave the bad stuff in here so you're not exposed to it.
The other thing to instill is that safe science is good science. When people are sloppy or haphazard, that's not going to lead to reproducible results. Safety always has to be a part of research and science. And if researchers are not injecting that into their experimental design, it's not going to be reproducible, and that’s going to be problematic for them down the line.
How does it feel to have a front-row seat on world-changing research?
I was very lucky to get hired right out of college at UCSF’s department of Microbiology and Immunology, where we had just had a Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. He was our departmental chair, and then he got tapped by Bill Clinton to head the NIH so he left. Then we got more heavy hitters: Liz Blackburn, who was doing her research on telomeres, and Mike Bishop, who also won the Nobel Prize. Working with those folks in the late 80s and early 90s on the cutting edge of virology — really trying to understand how HIV, hepatitis B, and all of these viral oncogenes played a role in human biology, and how we could potentially treat those diseases — was just amazing. And now, I work in MCB and IB with other Nobel laureates. We have Randy Scheckman, Jennifer Doudna and other folks who are doing amazing cutting-edge research.
Last October, you helped coordinate an evacuation drill in Li Ka Shing Hall for the Great ShakeOut. What were some of the things you learned from the drill, and how would you apply them to the other areas of safety and emergency management that you support?
I was really impressed by the professional nature in which that process was managed by the Office of Emergency Management. And I'm glad that they brought in an outside auditor to devise the drill. We want to partner with OEM to do more drills, particularly a “run, hide, fight” drill. We want to be prepared for all scenarios, whether that be earthquake, fire, natural disaster, active shooter, chemical release, biological release,etc.. We intend to conduct these and other varied scenario drills, as we also learned the importance of doing these exercises repeatedly as it highlights our blind spots and areas for continued improvement.
One takeaway from this particular drill was that communication is key. We worked to develop a communication tree, both through walkie talkies / radios and also through cellular devices, text and email. So we could rely on multiple modalities to communicate to our emergency response teams in the building.
The other takeaway — and a lot of folks maybe have this in the back of their mind, but it doesn't really dawn on you until you have one of these types of drills — is that if we do have an area-wide disaster like an earthquake, our first responders are going to be spread very thin. They may not be able to reach us. We may need to be our own keepers and our own saviors. So I think it's important to take some personal responsibility, get some CERT training, and develop in-house protocols for addressing these various scenarios.
You really have to be your brother's keeper, making sure you yourself are safe, your lab mates are safe, etc.
A major quake along the Hayward Fault is a question of when, not if. So it's good to be prepared.
What do you wish people knew about the role of a DSC?
We're there as a liaison for the labs and the building. A lot of folks are nervous when the inspectors come; they think it’s potentially a punitive scenario. I want to make sure that they don't think that. I always offer to do a pre-inspection. And then I walk with the lab safety EH&S folks during those inspections so I can see things that may not necessarily be on the prescribed list of inspection items.
I try to act proactively and sort of holistically as a DSC. I don't see it as just the safety role.
I was always the ergonomic evaluator. If there is a workplace injury or accident, we investigate those and we get them connected with the Tang Center or whomever. I also try to engage in risk management, if we have equipment that's been damaged or other things that need attention.
I try to make myself available for a soup-to-nuts approach in terms of providing everything that can be helpful in one's health and safety and wellness. Making sure that, as I said, they come in the building with 10 fingers and toes, leave with the same number, and then continue to come to work every day and be productive.