Dr- Emily Huang

Associate Professor, Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences

Dr. Emily (Yueng-hsiang) Huang received her Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology/Systems Science from Portland State University. During her more than 20 years as an occupational safety and health researcher and consultant, she has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, 6 book chapters, more than 100 worldwide conference presentations/proceedings and has provided recommendations to numerous occupational safety and health practitioners. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and has held a position as Associate Editor for the journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention since 2009.

While conducting research in both the laboratory and the field, Dr. Huang has led multidisciplinary efforts in investigating safety perceptions, and in developing and evaluating safety climate measures for a variety of industries. Most notably, she and her team developed a safety climate scale for lone workers in the trucking industry, a group plagued by accidents that had long been ignored because they were not a traditional work group. In recent years, safety climate has captured the attention of companies and scientists looking to reduce accidents and injuries. Companies that understand and monitor safety climate can identify where problems may lie and take appropriate steps to proactively improve safety. Dr. Huang has assisted a consulting unit of a worker-comp insurance company in implementing safety climate surveys with numerous companies across various industries to help improve the safety of these clients workers. At the Institute, Dr. Huang will continue studying and finding solutions to improve occupational safety and health. Her plans include continuing to develop various organizational climate scales, implementing occupational safety climate scales with companies, and building various industry database/benchmarks. She plans to bring in the holistic view/systems approach to the study of what is next after conducting organizational climate surveys and to develop and validate various organizational climate and culture and other safety interventions. I hope my work can help build a better, healthier, and safer workplace.