The Lab Safety Gurus
Discover the secrets to enhancing laboratory safety without the hassle of navigating complex regulations and modifying established practices.
Tune in to the enlightening discussions led by the knowledgeable Dan the Lab Safety Man and infectious disease behaviorist Sean Kaufman. Together, they explore a wide range of lab safety subjects on a weekly basis.
Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and engaging debates surrounding lab safety by tuning in to every episode.
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The Lab Safety Gurus
Sean Kaufman's Unconventional Route to Laboratory Safety
Embark on an intimate expedition with us, as we sit down with the remarkable Sean Kaufman, whose career trajectory in lab safety is as unconventional as it is inspirational. From the front lines of HIV psychosocial work to the high-stakes anthrax responses post-9/11, Sean's narrative captures a rare blend of psychology and infectious disease expertise. His transition to pivotal roles at the CDC, and the mentorship that propelled him to lead a mock BSL3/BSL4 laboratory program at Emory University, underscores a career punctuated by unexpected pathways and a focus on the human elements of lab safety.
Join your Lab Safety Gurus, Dan Scungio and Sean Kaufman, as we not only traverse Sean's professional milestones but also touch upon the deeply personal side of our lives—the fleeting moments with our children and the indelible impact of family. As we share our own experiences, we invite you to reflect on the importance of a nurturing lab safety culture and join us in our ongoing commitment to creating safer laboratory environments. This dialogue is a testament to how personal journeys and professional passions can intertwine, leaving a lasting legacy both within the lab and beyond its walls.
Welcome to the Lab Safety Gurus Podcast. I'm Dan Scungio.
Speaker 2:And I'm Sean Cawthon, and together we're providing safety insights for those working in laboratory settings Doing safety together.
Speaker 1:All right, welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, this is episode two of the Lab Safety Gurus Podcast, and today it is my honor to sort of interview and introduce you to my dear friend, sean Cawthon, who's been in the field of lab safety, and how he got there. It's an amazing story and you have to hear it, and so I'm going to be asking him some questions, talking to him today about some of that and kind of kind of we're kind of kind of weaving some other things as well, but I'm really excited to get things started. So, sean, tell us a little bit about your history before you got into lab safety. It's just really for me, it's an incredible story and I want to make sure everybody gets that.
Speaker 2:Dan, I appreciate it. I have to tell you that if I was visited by an angel or somebody who could foretell the future in graduate school and they would have told me the things that I would have done, I would have said there was just no way. I have been truly blessed professionally. It started very early with me being able to serve those who were infected and affected by HIV before a cure actually was around. I dealt with the psychosocial issues. If you were infected, how did you live a healthy life? What did you want to do? How could we empower you when you had received, quite literally, a death sentence at that time, but also the loved ones, family members of somebody who was just diagnosed? The stigma was so strong many, many years ago I've been doing this now for 27, 28 years the stigma was so strong associated with infectious disease that families were torn apart, and so I fell in love with that component. I always loved infectious diseases, but I loved the psychosocial issues, the psychology of infectious disease. Of course, anyone who likes infectious diseases has to work at CDC. So I left San Diego, california, and transferred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where, you know, I did some work in HIV, aids. And when protease inhibitors came around and a pill was able to manage and put HIV into more of a chronic condition, I transferred into parasitic diseases and developed the Healthy Swimming Project with Dr Michael Beach at the CDC and the Division of Parasitic Diseases.
Speaker 2:And then 9-11 happened, and I guess I'm telling this in a way that, like I could have sworn in Graduate School I would have worked in HIV for 30 years and that didn't happen. Things just developed and my career jumped from one place to another and so I went from HIV to parasitic diseases. And then September 11 happened and I had the honor and the privilege of not only serving the Emergency Response Center but also at CDC during that event, but being deployed to Trenton, new Jersey, to work with postal employees who were exposed to anthrax and trying to get them to take their antibiotics, while you know, they were within that incubation period, meaning if spores that they had breathed into their lungs began to germinate and they weren't on antibiotics, they would have gotten an inalienable anthrax. So I had the privilege of serving and when I returned to CDC I was no longer in parasitic diseases, I was in Emergency Response and it was called at that time as bioterrorism preparedness and emergency response. And so I had an opportunity to do a lot of training with FEMA, respond to the original SARS outbreak when West Nile virus was making its way for the first time across the United States Monkey Paw. It was just a great adventure.
Speaker 2:And I met my next big mentor, dr Ruth Berkelman. She was a former CDC employee and had taken a job at Emory and I remember meeting her and telling her about all of my emergency response experiences and she said, sean, it's not a matter of if you're coming to work at Emory University, it's just a matter of when. And I love that about her strength and her leadership. And so Dr Ruth Berkelman recruited me to Emory University and we started working and I'm not kidding you, dan, within a month or two there was a grant opportunity that came in from NIAID to build a mock BSL3, bsl4 laboratory and Dr Ruth Berkelman asked if I would direct that program because of my experience in behavioral training and psychology and infectious disease.
Speaker 2:Now I have to be honest with you, dan. That was and I'm scared to say this, that was 20 years ago. And back then 20 years ago, I was reading the BMBL. Now, for those out there who may not know what the BMBL is. It's the NIH CDC kind of gold standard. It's like the Bible of biosafety. And as I was reading it, I kept running into a word, dan, called Regents, thank you, and I had no clue what regents was and yeah, I know you're laughing. And finally a scientist had to say to me, sean, that word is not regents, it's reagents. And so that's how green I was. I didn't really want to focus, and even still today, I don't really focus much on science. I focus on behavior and I focus on how people behave in laboratories and the dimensions of behavior, or what I like to say, the residual risk factors, the things that we don't really assess in a risk assessment. I like to focus on those things and I've been doing that now for almost 20 years.
Speaker 2:I stayed with Emory until about 2014. I left and started a business. I actually started the business in 2011, but been full time at the business since 2014. And, as I said earlier, have just been blessed. I had an opportunity to serve on the Ebola outbreak. I've been involved in the Malaysia Airlines a grief coaching and grief counseling of family members who lost people on the Malaysian Airlines, have testified in Congress about the Anthrax CDC event and still to this day. As you know, dan, I sit on several court cases for those who were either injured by a COVID-19 vaccine or were forced or were fired as a result of not taking that vaccine. I'm an expert witness in several of those cases, trying to make people whole who have lost several things as a result of the policies during the COVID pandemic. So I've had an unbelievable career. I'm still gonna be. I'm not retiring ever, dan. I'm gonna work forever because that's how much I love my job. So that's a little bit about my background. Sorry, I took so much time.
Speaker 1:No, that's awesome, that. I think that really helps listeners understand. But I don't think that I don't. So you have a reach all the way around the world. The work you have done has had you traveling around the world, meeting with people around the world and working with safety, working to protect people around the world. So what do you think is your? You've definitely found your passion. What drives you to do that? What is the driver deep within Sean Kaufman that pushes you to do the work that you do? That has taken you so far and so wide and continues to keep you from retirement.
Speaker 2:Well, I tell people that are serving on the front lines One of the things that there are listeners out there that may understand the different types of laboratories, but not all laboratories are the same. You know we have laboratories that are in hospitals that their primary function is to try to identify what a sick patient has so that the doctors and the nurses can get the treatments right. So your heroes even though doctors and nurses get all the credit your heroes are really your lab staff. Then there's laboratories out there that are research labs. These laboratories are trying to develop treatments for threats that we either know about today or that potentially could be coming. These are our research labs. You've got laboratories out there that are public health labs. These are laboratories that try to determine when there's a threat that's happening in the community, in your state, and really truly are gonna be the first line of defense if there's ever really a biological or even a chemical event. Your public health laboratories are doing that. And then you know we can't forget the animal labs. These are laboratories that work with animals and try to ensure not only that animals stay healthy and are ethically treated properly and responsibly, but also those animals are heroes in a way that we have to make sure that our food supply is protected from diseases that could occur zoonotically. So I think there's.
Speaker 2:You know, dan, what I love is I love people who wake up every day and put themselves at risk with the work that they're doing and they don't ask for much. In fact, you know, the pay is not highly substantial in these arenas, but they don't ask for much. They work extremely hard and if there's any way that I can do to improve the overall safety of the profession they're serving in, then that's what I'm committed to. And you know, dan, the neat part about us we're both trainers and I get such a high when I see a light bulb go off in someone's head and you can see it. You can see the moment in training when you're talking and you can see the person, like the light switch comes on and you know, from that point going forward, they will never be the same. They will never do things the same ever again. And that's kind of the high that I get when we talk about training in biosafety or laboratory safety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just I love your passion and it just it drives me as well. So you wrote a book called Prepare and Protect Safer Behaviors in Laboratories and Clinical Containment Settings. What drove you to do that, what's the book about and why did you decide it was time to publish that?
Speaker 2:Well, this is. I mean, this is where you know. I have to give credit to God on this one, and I also have to thank Karen Byers out there in the biosafety arena, because Dan and I've shared this I think I've shared this with you but I just kept getting poked over and over and over again. When God wants something, if you're religious and you know this, he's not going to leave you alone until you do it. And I just kept getting poked and poked, and poked.
Speaker 2:And one of the greatest gifts that I've been given, one of the blessings that I've been given, is I've had a chance to work with some incredible people literally around the world, and they've shared their stories with me and in the book they shared their stories with you, and so I just felt that it was important for me to kind of just put in writing the experiences that I've had and trying to share some of the lessons that I've learned from all of these incredible mentors. And again, I think the book features so many people. Some I still talk to this day, some I really don't talk to, but they're all incredible professionals and they all have perspectives that, quite honestly, I think are very, very important when it comes to laboratory safety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very good. I highly recommend it, for sure. But, sean, throughout your career, you know, I've seen you in action. I've seen you as a teacher, I've seen you as a speaker. I've listened to you. You're just a natural. So for me, in my lab background, speaking and presenting was not natural. I had to learn it. I had to get some training. I actually joined the National Speakers Association so that I could learn more about that. How did you? Is that just natural to you from experience, or did you have to develop that in any way?
Speaker 2:I've learned that within all of us there are natural strengths and natural weaknesses. In fact, many people who are listening to this if they've listened long enough in this podcast, they know that my writing skills, the inattention to detail, it's not a strength for me, just as it was. In every email I write, I guarantee you there'll be a grammatical error and I've just at this point I've surrendered. It's not that I don't think that writing grammatically correct is a bad thing. I think it's a good thing. I wish I had it.
Speaker 2:I just don't have the time now that it takes for me to write beautifully. Dan, like you, I mean, it's just that you have a natural knack for it. I don't. But when it comes to training and when it comes to developing a PowerPoint or you give me a topic, for some strange reason it just clicks, and it's always been fairly easy for me I've always been able to be a translator, to be able to take complicated scientific information about infectious diseases and translate it into the general community so that they can feel empowered and they can act on the information they need to stay safe and protect themselves and their families. So I don't know where it comes from. I think it's a gift. It's a natural gift, but it's something that I'm very thankful for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what a gift. I'm thankful for it too, and I love watching it in action. Well, we've got a couple minutes left. What, sean, can you tell us about things that you like to do? Do you have down time? Do you have fun time? Do you have hobbies? What do you do? Well, I'm not working.
Speaker 2:Well, I love tennis. I am married to an incredible woman, Jacqueline. She's my crazy Italian woman from Long Island. She keeps me in check and she loves you, Dan. You know that and I know you and Jacqueline get along very well I wouldn't mess with her.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't mess with her either. I think one of my greatest hobbies right now is I have two sons that are in the military and I follow them, kind of like when they were younger kids. They looked up to their parents, they looked up to their dad and it's weird because I've kind of flipped the script. They're out now and I'm looking up to them and they're kind of their number one cheerleader, and so I have a daughter who's got attitude, she's strong, she's beautiful, she's got attitude. She's a junior in high school, graduating very soon and hopefully going off to college. But I have to put in a plug I'll do training. If you're a parent out there with young children, they will not always be in your home and they will develop a legacy of their own. So cherish the gift that you have with them while you have it and really spend some time with them, because you think it's going to be there forever, but it simply isn't. So enjoy the time that you've got.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely that's true. Well, Sean, thanks so much for the information today. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you learned a lot about Sean and what he has to say about lab safety and his passion, which you will hear more of in future episodes. We're going to be talking back and forth about a lot of different topics, but, sean, it's been great hearing more about your life. I was already honored before to know you and to be your friend, but even more so knowing what I know now. So I hope everybody gets the message that we're here to promote lab safety and we'll be talking to you in future episodes about that more and more.
Speaker 2:We are the Lab Safety Gurus Dan Scungill and Sean Kaufman.
Speaker 1:Thank you for letting us do lab safety together.