Two seniors and one graduate student win awards from the American Society of Safety Engineers
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Dylan Morrill
Equinox Staff
Travis Brenner is a senior at Keene State College majoring in safety and occupational health and applied sciences.
Due to Brenner’s active accomplishments in the American Society of Safety Engineers student chapter on campus, he was awarded the Flatiron Construction Christopher Gonzalez Memorial Scholarship from the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) in late March. It is a $4,700 scholarship.
Brenner is not alone.
Two other KSC students received awards from the American Society of Safety Engineers National Foundation (ASSE).
Timothy Brinkerhoff, a senior safety and occupational health applied sciences major at KSC, received the Greater Boston Chapter Leadership Award and Joshua Besnoff, a KSC graduate student, received the New England Area Future Leadership Award. Both awards included a scholarship of $1,000.
ASSE was started in 1911 after a large factory fire in New York City that took the lives of 146 workers.
The goal was to create a society of safety engineers to help promote safety across the country in all industries in order to prevent what happened in 1911.
Today, ASSE represents more than 34,000 safety, health, and environmental professionals.
They work toward creating a safer work environment through various means including funding research, sponsoring conferences, and of course, providing over 50 annual scholarship awards to undergraduate and graduate students.
Like many other colleges with a safety studies major, KSC has a student led chapter of ASSE at the college. Brenner is the current president of the KSC chapter.
The safety and occupational health program as a whole at KSC is considered one of the best in the region.
Larry McDonald, the chair of Technology Design and Safety at KSC and a 23 year veteran of the college, has seen the progress of the safety studies program at KSC firsthand.
“We’ve done well over the years. We have a contract with the United States Department of Labor. We are already training faculty for the OSHA education center and just this past year, every state is required to have a safety consulting operation to provide safety consulting to small business and the state asked us to take this over.”
When asked about the three awards, McDonald said that KSC students winning some of the annual ASSE awards has become somewhat expected.
Students are consistently working hard and getting rewarded. “We will usually have three or four students who win at the national level every year,” McDonald said.
Brinkerhoff echoed McDonald’s sentiment. “[The awards are] becoming a tradition each year and that says a lot about the recognition of Keene State as a whole, the admiration of the program, and the outstanding faculty that teach the students.”
But the awards are not easy to get. McDonald praised the three students for going above and beyond to deserve the awards. “These are all three students that early on became involved. They all served at various levels in the office of the [KSC ASSE chapter]. They did more than they had to do and I think it’s paid off for them,” McDonald said.
The three ASSE awards help push the safety and occupational health applied sciences major at KSC down the track of becoming one of the best safety studies majors in the nation.
The new Technology Design and Safety Center (TDS) at KSC, which is expected to be completed by August, is expected to help push the major down that path as well.
When completed, the TDS Center will be 53,000 square feet and house impressive twenty-first century classrooms and equipment. The TDS Center is expected to—according to the TDS Center webpage—“expand total enrollment capacity in Safety Studies, Architecture, and SPDI from 340 to 500.”
Brinkerhoff, who will not be able to experience the new TDS center because he is graduating in May, still believes the center will do great work for bettering the major. “[The TDS Center] will hopefully accelerate the program in becoming one of the best in the country.”
All three students, if they follow the paths of past graduates of the occupational safety and health applied sciences major, could end up working at buildings like the new One World Trade Center building which is being built at Ground Zero in New York City. A few KSC graduates work there now.
Brenner, when asked how he felt when he got the email saying he won the award, said, “I was very excited. I was just overall happy; unbelievable feeling.”
Dylan Morrill can be contacted at
dmorrill@keene-equinox.com.