Meet the Speaker: Dr. Ryan Olson
Get ready to set the stage for prevention with Dr. Ryan Olson
"I met Ryan when he was just a pup in graduate school working with John Austin who keynoted the 2023 Summit. I fondly remember that Ryan was always the person who tried to post me up and argue during my talks at research conferences. But Ryan then went on to outshine all of us in his esteemed research career founding a NIOSH Center of Excellence in Oregon before recently moving to his home state of Utah to start a graduate program.?My favorite moment of his career is when Dan Rather of CBS news used his funded and powerful research on the health behaviors of long haul truckers (at truck stops) to demonstrate government waste in his “Where your Money Goes” segments. Regardless of what Rather said, Ryan is the top researcher in Total Worker Health; the rest of us are just pretenders"
—Timothy Ludwig, Summit Founder
The Presentation
One of the first lessons in behavioral science is that behavior is a function of its consequences. If we want to change behavior, we must change its consequences. Perhaps a second lesson is that antecedents, or the things that happen before behavior, are weaker or less effective for creating change. However, in workplace safety certain types of antecedents are paradoxically more important to address and more powerful than behavioral consequences. An example is removing or reducing hazards. In this talk I’ll describe this prevention paradox and share several strategies for putting “first things first” in your injury prevention processes.?
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About our speaker...
Dr. Olson is an Occupational Health Psychologist who specializes in improving the safety and health of isolated workers in demanding jobs. In addition to his internationally recognized safety and health research with commercial drivers, Dr. Olson is a founding investigator and past Co-Director of the Oregon Healthy Workforce Center—a NIOSH Center of Excellence in Total Worker Health?. For over a decade he provided leadership for Oregon’s expanded occupational health surveillance program, which included workplace fatality surveillance, investigation, and prevention. Dr. Olson recently joined the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Utah where he is helping establish a new graduate training program in Occupational Health Psychology.
Want to see what else Tim has up his sleeve?