Biography

Bob McClay is a private consultant providing a range of safety services to government, business and industry. His holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, an MBA, and has completed graduate coursework in Industrial Hygiene and in Ergonomics.

Bob has been a Safety Professional for 35 years, having worked as a Navy Systems Safety Engineer, a faculty member in academic Safety Sciences at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and at East Carolina University. At IUP Bob helped to develop undergraduate and graduate programs that were the first ASSE accredited programs in the nation.

Bob is a Professional Member of ASSE having joined in 1973. He has served in officer positions in the Western Pennsylvania Chapter and the Eastern Carolina Chapter. In both chapters he served as President in years when the chapter received Chapter Achievement Awards. He has served as part of four (4) different ROC’s and has served as Director for the Keystone Area in Region VIII.

At the national level, McClay served as the first Chair of the ASSE Technical Publications Committee and was a member of the Council for Professional Development.
He represented ASSE on the NFPA 30 Standard Committee for six years and currently is the society’s representative on the ASTM 56 Committee on Nanotechnology.

Bob has served on the BCSP and was President of the Board in 1991-92. McClay has been recognized as SPY at both the chapter and regional levels, is an ASSE President’s Award recipient, and named an ASSE Fellow in 2003.

Platform Statement

The ASSE has made great strides in the past ten years in helping to upgrade the status and visibility of Safety Professionals to policy makers outside of the profession. ASSE’s activities in standards development, academic program accreditation, governmental affairs and international activities have thrust it to the forefront of the SHE profession. Our challenge now is to maintain this position and initiate further advances. But there are major obstacles to be overcome.

Many Safety Professionals despair that our profession is still largely unknown to the public and our work is undervalued by employers in many industries. The society has made a major move to combat these problems by elevating the ASSE public relations function. Still we need to keep searching for novel and untried ideas that will gain public recognition of the profession to employers and legislators. For example, increasing our efforts to educate journalists about the practice of SHE might prove to have good effects.

It becomes more and more difficult for ASSE Chapters to recruit volunteer members who are willing to serve as chapter officers and committee chairs. It is not uncommon for some chapter members to be serving for the second or third time because no one else can be induced to take these chapter positions. The society needs to study this problem and collect all of the best ideas from the chapters that have attacked this problem. The development of a, ”Chapter Officer Idea Book” that would provide some guidance to the chapters in this area would be a helpful step. A continuing effort to reduce chapter reporting requirements would also be beneficial