Past Recipients - 38 by 38 - Purdue University

It's more than likely that Keith Rhoades has worked on at least one of the products on your desk, in your child's toybox, or in your refrigerator, medicine cabinet or snack drawer. Currently the global director at Interek RiSE, he has advanced six levels within the company in nine years. He is a "myth buster" of sorts, defining risks in the consumer-product experience. The scope of his work is wide and encompasses recent hazard assessment techniques in anthropometrics, eye impact injuries, suffocation, airway obstruction and aspiration, human and canine bio-mechanic interaction, and CO2 rebreathing.

One project close to his heart centers around button cell battery ingestion by children. His research laid the foundation for a new medical standard of care in the United States and six other countries. Thanks to his work, a new law requiring mitigation strategies to limit accessibility to these batteries went live in March 2024.

Rhoades is co-founder of the non-profit Global Injury Research Collaborative (GIRC) and its companion app. The app established a groundbreaking initiative in injury prevention and equips medical professionals with the tools to anonymously report relevant details of product-related injuries. Over 600 medical experts have registered and contributed since its launch. In 2022, he co-founded a student mentorship program for the International Consumer Products Health and Safety Organization. To date, 30 students have been accepted into the program, including five Boilermakers, and 13 already have found their way into a product safety profession. As a co-investigator, he has been awarded a five-year National Institutes of Health Grant to research root causes of Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Syndrome as they relate to infant breathing and biomechanics.