Sheri Ledbetter
Chapman announced the appointment of Charles “Chuck” Sohaskey, Ph.D., to the position of Lab Safety Administrator for the University’s Rinker Health Science Campus in Irvine, CA, effective June 13, 2016. Dr. Sohaskey is the principal Environmental Health and Safety professional responsible for supporting the success of laboratory safety management at the two-year-old Rinker campus, which houses Chapman’s School of Pharmacy in addition to graduate programs for physical therapy, communication sciences and disorders, and a pending physician’s assistant studies program.
Reporting to the director of risk management, Dr. Sohaskey will serve in three key areas of responsibility. First, as an environment health and safety officer, his duties involve assured compliance with all matters of health and safety at the Rinker campus, with an emphasis on laboratory safety for both the research and teaching labs. In addition, he will serve as a resource to faculty, staff and researchers in an effort to support their key objectives as they relate to research activities.
Dr. Sohaskey also will serve as the Chapman University Biosafety Officer and will support the activities of the Institutional Biosafety Committee and the Science Safety Committee. He will also function as the key representative on the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee as well as the Institutional Review Board. More about Chapman’s Environmental Health and Safety can be found
here.
“It is exciting to be offered this opportunity at Chapman University, allowing me to contribute to the success of Chapman’s new and vibrant growth in the health sciences, while providing direction and support across both campus locations,” said Dr. Sohaskey. “Chapman has a reputation as a dynamic place for academic excellence. The current growth of programs at the Rinker Health Science campus is very exciting and I look forward to being part of the upcoming changes, evolution, design and development of health and safety programs to support this growth.”
Dr. Sohaskey earned his Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Texas, Austin, following his B.S degree in microbiology from the University of North Texas, Denton. He engaged as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio Department of Microbiology and in Molecular Genetics at UCI. Since 1998, Dr. Sohaskey has worked as a health science specialist and principal investigator engaged in tuberculous research with the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) at the Veterans Administration Long Beach Healthcare System in Long Beach, CA.
During his tenure at the VA, his responsibilities including operating and maintaining a biosafety level 3 laboratory (the second highest category in levels of biosafety precautions) where he gained a solid understanding of issues dealing with research safety for a high security and safety lab.
Add comment