Instilling educated anxiety over laboratory safety in undergraduate students: using radiation safety as an example

Working in university laboratories involves various risks. Indeed, it is a challenging task to educate undergraduate students so that they can become always and fully aware of the associated risks, but at the same time they are not over-anxious about working in laboratories. Such an education outcome can be referred to as an “educated anxiety”. The present project aims to develop strategies to instill educated anxiety over radiation safety in undergraduate students involved in experiments using radioactive sources and/or irradiation apparatus. New laboratory sessions and/or mini-projects will be designed for existing courses for such purposes. Although the present project will focus on ionizing-radiation safety, it is expected that the developed strategies can be generalized to other categories of laboratory safety such as chemical safety and biological safety.