Occupational Ergonomics Technical Group

The Occupational Ergonomics Technical Group is excited to announce this year's awards. All submissions accepted to the Occupational Ergonomics track for presentation at the 67^th International Annual Conference will be considered for the awards automatically by the program committee. Shortlisted presentations will be judged at the annual conference by a selected committee composed of OETG members.

There will be five award categories; each award winner will receive $300.
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Yadrianna Acosta-Sojo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Center for Occupational Safety, Ergonomics, and Injury Prevention
3323F Shelby Center
345 W Magnolia Ave,
Auburn University, AL 36849
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I would like to know who decide on these awards and why it was not brought to the OETG as a whole? I would think a change in the awards would need to be approved by the OETG membership, especially if they have money award affiliated with them.  I would like to know why we need to have 5 awards, how often would we have more than one paper in each of these areas, and logic for each one. We should then discuss as a group whether these are appropriate.

Kermit

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Kermit Davis CPE
Professor
University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati OH
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Thanks for your question Kermit. We had a business meeting at the annual conference, where increasing participation and engagement of OETG members and increasing the number of conference submissions were mentioned as key issues to be addressed by the new leadership. We had an online business meeting in December, when we, the new committee took over, and discussed including new awards as one of the potential ways of increasing excitement and participation from the community. In light of the fact that no awards were made last year, we (the program committee) came up with this list of three new awards (two of the five were already in place). As per the bylaws, operational decisions (especially budgetary ones) that were <33% of the TG's balance didn't need further approval. To clarify, the sum total of these awards is <10% of our current TG's balance, and is also less than the membership dues that we will be collecting for just this year. So, we feel that this is financially justifiable, and reasonable.

Now, as for the logic and the process, I am glad you brought this up, as we were planning to make further announcements in time. We intend to use the same operational procedure as for the two existing awards, where all submitted abstracts to the TG are considered, the first step is to decide based on the reviewer scores, and then make final decisions based on the conference presentations. We (the program committee) will have to assign abstracts to the different categories for the awards, as that won't be indicated in the submission. We will also *not consider* one paper in more than one category.

Finally, we haven't discussed these specific awards with the OETG membership at large. The abstracts are due by the end of this month, it has been less than 2 months since we started in our roles, and we wanted to get the word out soon so that everyone has time to prepare and submit abstracts, But we serve this society to represent, and have the TG's best interests at heart. So, if there are concerns or discussions to be had, we are happy to receive your feedback and align our actions with the majority. We can continue to discuss this here, or we can announce a virtual business meeting within the next few weeks - I would appreciate some feedback on the best course of action for moving forward.

Thanks,

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Divya Srinivasan CPE
Professor, Industrial Engineering, Clemson SC
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