Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle): Reed, Rustin J. Project Summary Program History: The Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine academic industrial hygiene program began in 1980 with the hiring of the first two faculty in the areas of industrial hygiene and toxicology. The IH program offered the MSPH graduate degree and was designed as an on-campus, evening-based program to serve local and regional mid- career professionals who desired advanced education and training in industrial hygiene. In the early 1990s, a distance learning component was developed using teleconference audio-video technology to deliver the program to a cohort of students at the DOE facility in Hanford, WA. As the internet matured and bandwidth increased, the distance learning program converted to synchronous, internet-based delivery in the late 1990s. This conversion provided an unlimited expansion in the reach of the program, in effect allowing the matriculation of distance learning students from anywhere in the United States and indeed, the world. The MSPH-IH program was fully accredited by ABET in 1996 and included both on-campus and distance learning formats. Our program was the first distance learning program in industrial hygiene to be so accredited. The MSPH industrial hygiene program is currently accredited by ABET through 2029. In 2006, we also began offering a graduate certificate in industrial hygiene in response to a need created by new educational requirements instituted by the American Board of Industrial Hygiene (now the Board for Global EHS Credentialing) for eligibility for the CIH. Since the IH program began in 1980 and through May 2023, we will have graduated approximately 211 students with the MSPH in industrial hygiene. Of these graduates, 101 completed the degree in the distance learning format. So far, 96 (45.7%) of our graduates have obtained the CIH certification from the Board of Global EHS Credentialing, with five current students holding the designation. Of the NIOSH TPG trainees who have graduated, 50% hold the CIH credential. Twenty-four of our graduates and one current student hold the CSP from the Board of Certified Safety Professionals. In addition to the MSPH-IH graduates, we have conferred 32 graduate certificates in industrial hygiene up to this point. Several of the IH certificate students have subsequently matriculated into the MSPH-IH degree program. Need for the Program: In a survey of employers and education providers commissioned by NIOSH in 2011,1 the estimated number of OS&H professionals that employers expect to hire in 2011 and in the following 5 years was 25,000, whereas OS&H training/education programs were anticipated to produce only 13,000 such individuals. The shortfall of new graduates in OS&H in comparison to the estimated need is being exacerbated by the aging of the OS&H workforce with disproportionate rates of retirement among safety and health professionals. 1 M.T. McAdams, J.J. Ke...