Lab Safety

The following information outlines safety resources pertaining to the Department of Chemistry.

Safety Training

For people who will be working in any type of lab, Annual Safety Training is required.

Learn more about Annual Lab Safety Training

Additional courses will be required depending on which type of work they will be doing specifically. Examples include radiation, lasers, hazmat shipping, formaldehyde, and methylene chloride.

Learn more about additional training courses

Incident Reporting

The Accident/Incident Report Form must be used by all faculty members, staff members, students, contractors and visitors to report any accident that resulted in bodily injury/illness, an incident that could have resulted in bodily injury (a near miss) or an incident that resulted in property damage that occurred on Tufts property or on a Tufts sponsored/approved activity off campus.

PLEASE COMPLETE THIS DOCUMENT TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY. LEAVE ANY QUESTIONS BLANK THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW THE ANSWER TO OR WHEN INFORMATION IS NOT READILY AVAILABLE. IT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAT TUFTS BE ADVISED OF THE INCIDENT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, RATHER THAN RECEIVE A COMPLETED FORM. IN THE EVENT OF ANY SERIOUS INJURY REQUIRING MEDICAL ATTENTION, IMMEDIATELY CONTACT THE TUFTS UNIVERSITY POLICE EMERGENCY NUMBER AT 617-636-6911.

The report must be emailed to Risk Management – Tufts University (riskmanagement@tufts.edu) or sent to: Tufts University, Risk Management, 169 Holland St, Somerville, MA 02144. Also please copy chemoffice@elist.tufts.edu and the Department Safety Committee Chair.

When an incident happens in a teaching lab:

(1) The lab director must email a short summary to the following five people ASAP:

The Course Instructor
The Safety Committee Chair (Prof. Charlie Mace)
The Department Office
The Department Chair (Prof. Yu-Shan Lin)
The Lab Safety Office

(2) The TA must complete the incident report within 24 hours and send it to the following seven people:

Download the Accident/Incident Report Form

Shipping Chemicals

There are specific rules and regulations related to shipping chemicals and biologicals, both within the United States and internationally.

View the rules and regulations for shipping/transporting hazardous materials

Safety Committee Chair

Charlie Mace

Associate Professor

Bioanalytical and Materials Chemistry. To solve outstanding problems in global health, the Mace Lab applies a multidisciplinary approach combining aspects of analytical chemistry, materials science, and engineering. The primary goal of the Mace lab is to develop low cost, patient-centric technologies that can improve access to healthcare. To achieve this, the Mace Lab designs devices that improve the self-collection of blood and enable the diagnosis of diseases in resource-limited settings, and they are exploring ways the methods that are developed in the lab can used by others. Their main techniques leverage the properties of paper and other porous materials to integrate function into simple, affordable devices. Unique to laboratories in Chemistry departments, his group specializes in handling human blood and saliva. Technologies developed in the Mace lab have made the leap to clinical sites in Africa, South America, and the US, owing to their network of clinical, academic, and industry collaborators. The Mace Lab has broad expertise in assay development and device prototyping, which they apply to evaluating the efficacy of candidate therapeutics, performing separations that lead to new measurements, and making field-deployable kits for point-of-care testing. They have additional expertise in instrument development, phase separation in systems of polymers, and microfluidics.