The winners of the 2012 Liberty Mutual Research Fellowship program funded by the ASSE Foundation – Tzurei Chen, M.S., of Eugene, Ore., and Andrew S. Merryweather, Ph.D., of Salt Lake City – both focus their research on issues impacting work safety for an aging work force. They will do their research at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute in Hopkinton, Mass., this summer.
Chen, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon, will be pursuing research on “Assessing the Feasibility of Using Laboratory Measures of Gait Imbalance to Prospectively Predict Falls Risk in the Elderly.” Merryweather, a research assistant professor at the University of Utah, will pursue his research on the study to “Evaluate the Effects of Hospital Bed Adjustments and Slip Parameters in a Population of Fall-Prone, Older Adults.”
The goal of the Liberty Mutual Fellowship Program is to encourage research activity in the field of safety; familiarize graduate students, faculty members and other researchers with current research projects and up-to-date research models and applications to expand the body of knowledge; expand and stimulate safety research understanding; provide a forum for linking safety professionals, industry needs and quality research programs; and lay the groundwork for graduate students and faculty members to pursue safety/health applied research projects of their choice.