Deborah Grubbe

Grubbe is president and owner of Operations and Safety Solutions, LLC, a consultancy that works with multinational firms in the chemical, oil and gas, construction and aerospace industries to improve utilization and productivity of hard assets, advise on world class safety performance and outcomes and positive safety culture change, and partners with subcontractors and others in the supply chain. Her global clients include those in India, Qatar, Malaysia and Singapore, and worked with the Canadian Railway System on the subject of safety culture after the Lec Megantic, Quebec, explosion and fire.

Following her studies at Purdue, Grubbe received a Winston Churchill Fellowship to attend Cambridge University in England, where she received a Certificate of Post-Graduate Study in Chemical Engineering. She is the former Vice President of Group Safety for BP plc, where she was trained in the characteristics of safe operations. During her 27-year career at DuPont, she held corporate director positions in operations, engineering and safety. Her many assignments included capital governance, project management and execution, process safety implementation, strategic safety assessments, manufacturing management, organizational change leadership and human resources.

From 2003 to 2012, Grubbe served as a member of the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, and was a consultant on safety culture to the Columbia Shuttle Accident Investigation Board. In May 2012, she received the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal. She has served on the Engineering Advisory Council for Rowan University, and worked with the Advisory Council for the Advanced Safety and Engineering Management Master’s Program at the University of Alabama--Birmingham. She is an Emeritus member of the Center for Chemical Process Safety, and has worked with the National Academy of Sciences to support the demilitarization of the US chemical weapons stockpile. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and is the former chair of the AIChE Institute for Sustainability, where she led a global effort to establish a credential in the field. She is leading an AIChE programmatic effort to develop an institute-wide Center for Ethical Engineering and Leadership. She also serves as the director of programming for the AIChE Virtual Local Section, and is the incoming chair for the Licensure and Professional Development Committee.

Grubbe has lectured extensively to students and professionals on safety and ethics, and co-authored a series of three interactive eBooks on process safety and risk reduction, occupational and process safety for college freshmen and an all-discipline eBook on Ethics – An Engineers’ Professional Responsibility. She advises and supports two start-up companies – one in Philadelphia and one in London. The firms, Near-Miss Management, LLC, and PetroMall, Ltd., are both actively engaged with supporting improved safety and reliability in upstream and downstream oil and gas.

A trailblazing female engineer, she became in 1985, the first woman and youngest elected member on the State of Delaware Registration Board for Professional Engineers. She has been active in the Delaware and Pennsylvania communities; as former president and board member of the Chesapeake Bay Girl Scout Council and a past board member of the YWCA of Delaware. She is a board member of Girls Incorporated of Delaware, where she serves as development director to support minority and underserved girls’ interests in the STEM fields.

Grubbe received the State of Delaware’s Engineer of the Year Award and the Purdue Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award in 2002, and was honored by Purdue in 2010 with an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering.