Mr. Wesley White

Principal Scientist

Process Risk Assessment,

Evonik - Tippecanoe Labs

 

Host:  Dr. Gabriela Nagy

 

Mr. Wesley White earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Hope College in Holland, Michigan and a Master of Science in Organic Chemistry from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.  As a Discovery Chemistry Research scientist at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, he spent several years synthesizing novel anti-cancer organic molecule targets.  In 2005, he moved to the Lafayette Tippecanoe Labs site to enjoy several years of production support and scale-up from lab scale to 4000 gallon reactors in an FDA good manufacturing practices environment.  In 2010, the Tippecanoe Labs site was purchased by Evonik Corporation and became a contract manufacturing organization for all of the Pharma industry.  During his time at Tippe Labs he was trained in root cause investigation and process hazard analysis and discovered his passion for process safety.  Since 2014, he has used that passion as the lead scientist for the Tippecanoe Labs Reactive Hazard Testing laboratory.  In that capacity, Wesley screens all plantsite chemistry for thermal and pressure hazards.  The outcome of that testing is then shared with design teams to help ensure safe chemical process designs.  Wesley also enjoys spending time facilitating safety culture conversations at Tippe Labs to help ensure everyone is working as safely as possible every shift, every day.

 

Join us for a conversation about keeping our lab safety culture strong and improving.  Wesley White, the lead chemist running the Reactive Hazard Testing lab at Evonik Tippecanoe Labs, will be sharing observations about lab safety in the chemical industry.  We’ll compare and contrast safety culture challenges between academic and industrial labs.  Through conversation and a little bit of brainstorming, we will work together to identify what is working well in Purdue research labs and areas for possible improvement.  In the end, we all want everyone going home safely, after every class, every day.