URBANA, Ill. — Dr. Salah Issa’s career in agricultural safety began in an unexpected way. Starting out at a graduate program in Ecological Sciences and Engineering at Purdue University as a self-described “city kid”, he was unaware that agricultural engineering was even a career option. It wasn’t until he took a course in agrosecurity that the world of agriculture, and its hazards, opened up to him.
“My undergraduate degree was in biochemistry, and I originally thought I would be working in a lab,” he says. “Before I arrived at Purdue in 2009, I had no real grasp of agricultural engineering or the amount of research that goes into agriculture. But the more I learned, the more fascinated I became. Along the way, I realized I didn’t want to spend my career in a biochemical lab; I preferred working with people.”
This period marked the beginning of Issa’s career in ag safety, a field he has now spent over a decade advancing, focusing his research and extension work on injury prevention and hazard reduction in agriculture with the help of new technologies.
Grain bins were Salah’s first focus. “The professor of my agrosecurity class had a research slot open, so the very next semester I started working with him. He had collected over a thousand cases of grain entrapments at local farms, which quickly became my main project.”
Grain entrapments occur when a person becomes partially or fully submerged in stored grain within a bin or silo. Much like quicksand, entrapped individuals can be quickly pulled down into the bin, restricting their movement and breathing.
Salah’s Ph.D. was built as a collection of investigative studies on these cases, combining case analysis with simulation models to explore unanswered questions around grain entrapment.
Read the full article from the Office of Data Science Research. Writer: Sasha Zvenigorodsky
University of Illinois Extension develops educational programs, extends knowledge, and builds partnerships to support people, communities, and their environments as part of the state's land-grant institution. Extension serves as the leading public outreach effort for University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences in all 102 Illinois counties through a network of 27 multi-county units and over 500 staff statewide. Extension’s mission is responsive to eight strategic priorities — community, economy, environment, food and agriculture, health, partnerships, technology and discovery, and workforce excellence — that are served through five program areas — 4-H youth development, agriculture and agribusiness, community and economic development, health and community wellness, and natural resources, environment, and energy.