The Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA) hosted its third annual Safety Summit in 2022, bringing together over 200 construction industry safety professionals from across North America to discover the latest alliance research, share best practices and connect with peers, advocates, and leaders in the field.
Due to high demand, the event was also live-streamed, with virtual participants joining from across the world.
The CSRA is a unique research organization, funded by industry membership and focused on transformative construction safety research co-created by industry leaders and experienced scientists. Their mission is to eliminate serious incidents and fatalities (SIF) in the construction industry through robust research and defendable science.
Research for the CSRA is led by executive director Matthew Hallowell, who is also an associate professor for civil, environmental and architectural engineering at CU Boulder. His vision led to the establishment of the CSRA and a network of industry safety professionals keen to actively engage in construction safety research made possible by both their financial contributions and active engagement in the research teams.
From small beginnings, the CSRA has now grown to a membership of over 80 companies from the U.S. and Canada, all with a shared vision to improve construction safety.
Hallowell is supported by associate directors Sid Bhandari and Fred Sherratt who lead the industry-academic research teams, and Ayleen Perez, operations manager. Industry funding supports students at all levels, leading to the development of the safety professionals and experts of the future. The CSRA academic research team includes PhD students, graduate, and undergraduate research assistants.
“American union activist Mother Jones said to remember the dead and fight like hell for the living,” said Sherratt. “That's what we're doing through all our research."
All CSRA research is open access and available for free. The industry-academic projects lead to peer-reviewed publications that provide the defendable science and support the generation of readily applicable outputs for practice.
Previous projects have included work to demystify the common safety metric of TRIR (total recordable incident rate), the creation of tools to measure the quality of safety leading indicators, and a range of resources to support the investigation of incidents to optimize learning. Organizations can easily incorporate CSRA videos and resource in their training and development sessions.
Ongoing projects include exploring the concept of safety ROI (return on investment), determining how best to train people about safety, and working with the Construction Industry Institute to tackle the problem of poor mental health amongst the industry workforces. The CSRA’s next projects will launch in February 2023 and focus on safety culture and the use of controls on jobsites.
The CSRA team often present their work to industry organizations across the U.S., and even further afield, including plans to present at the International Labor Organization’s 23rd World Congress on Safety and Health at Work in Sydney, Australia, in 2023.
The next 2023 CSRA Annual Safety Summit will take place Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023, at CU Boulder.
