Kendra Broadwater, NIOSH industrial hygienist, on her science career: transcript

Key points

• Broadwater jokes that she dislikes the name industrial hygiene because people ask if she brushes teeth or washes hands.
• Her father taught her algebra early, and her interest in science grew in high school and college.
• While studying environmental health at the University of Washington, she worked on a team studying chemical exposures that cause asthma in car painters.
• She finds her work meaningful when workers realize that hazards like noise or heavy lifting could affect their families.
• Her team collects data on site, analyzes it and publishes reports with recommendations that others can use.
• She says working alongside women scientists helped her development, and that hard work and passion matter more than aptitude.

Chapters

1. 0:00Early interest in math and science
2. 1:02Environmental health studies and exposure research
3. 1:50Why the work is meaningful and how it is done
4. 2:51Advice for women entering science

Full transcript

0:00Hello, welcome. I think the one thing I don't like about industrial hygiene is that it's called industrial hygiene. I'm always asked, do I brush teeth or do I wash hands? I was good at math from a young age because of my dad. He taught me algebra before I probably should have learned algebra. However, once I got to high school, that's when I really became interested in science as a field and then that just grew throughout college. When I was studying environmental Health at the University of Washington, we looked at a bunch of things in the realm

1:02of environmental health, such as air quality, water quality, food quality. But when I started working in a lab, I started going out into the workplace with a team of researchers looking at exposure to chemicals that would cause asthma in people who painted cars. And I think that experience really cemented my interest in exposure science or environmental health. You For me, there had to be a personal component. So, in industrial hygiene, I found that component. I found the ability to work with people and help people in a really meaningful way, in my opinion.

1:50It happens in every job I've ever had. It's been, someone realizes, oh, if I'm exposed to too much noise, I won't be able to hear my grandkids, or if I continue to lift this big block of metal with something that you're not supposed to lift it with, my kids could be without a dad. every time that happens that's when I'm really proud of what I do and it really that's why I chose what I what I ended up doing we go on site visits and collect a lot of data at a particular workplace then once we have that data we analyze it we put it in a report and we provide recommendations in order to improve workplace health. Once that report is published it can be used by a bunch of people in that field to employ those recommendations at their workplace even though we didn't even go there.

2:51My experience specifically has been just a bunch of amazing women scientists, like we would be in the field processing samples and they would be talking about how they got where they are and they ask you where you want to go. That is part of the most important development when you're working to become a female scientist. This is a transcript. There's nothing to replace hard work, so it doesn't really matter what aptitude you think you have or don't have going into the sciences or math or technology.

3:27It's really about the work you put into it and the passion you bring to your work. You can really achieve whatever you want to achieve as long as you're willing to put in the time. We'll see you next time.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Science Speaks - Talking to Women in Science (Kendra, Industrial Hygienist).webm by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (2014-03-07), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.