2022 AIHA BC Yukon AGM Feature Speaker
Laurence Svirchev, MA, BSc, CIH
Laurence Svirchev, MA, BSc., CIH has a 38 year career in Occupational Health and Safety, becoming interested in the discipline while an automotive assembly line and plywood mill worker in British Columbia Canada.
In 1984 he obtained a diploma of technology in Occupational Health and Safety from the British Columbia Institute of Technology joining the Division of Epidemiology, Biometry and Occupational Epidemiology of the BC Cancer Agency participating case-control and cohorts studies in general industry, aluminum reduction, and pulp and paper.
In 1992 he obtained a Bachelor Of Science from The Montana School Of Mines In Occupational Health And Safety. In 1994, he became certified in the practice of industrial hygiene (CIH) by the American Board of Industrial Hygiene and joined the Worker's Compensation Board of British Columbia. There he worked as a hygiene and safety inspector in multiple industries’. With the outbreak of SARS-1 in 2003, he joined the SARS Scientific Committee on behalf of WorkSafeBC. He spent five years as a Fatalities Investigator, investigating over 35 workplace fatalities.
In 2010, he received an Master of Arts in Disaster and Emergency Management from Royal Roads University. He conducted his thesis on the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake with field investigation in Sichuan China under the auspices of the Chengdu University of Technology. His thesis was titled “Evaluation of China's Earthquake Disaster Management Systems”.
From 2010 to 2019, he managed Hygiene-Safety-Social programs for large Chinese construction companies building hydro-electric dams and industrial infrastructure in China, Indonesia, Fiji, and in the Sahel region of Africa.
At the first signs of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in China developing into an international pandemic in January 2020, he began collaborating with the American Industrial Hygiene Association, Workplace Health Without Borders, and multiple ad-hoc organizations promoting safe work procedures in the health care industry, especially the scientific discipline of small particle physics to encourage the use of respirators to prevent exposure to infectious bio-aerosols. His latest employment was as a COVID-19 Compliance Officer in the film industry. In 2021, he became of a member of the Canadian Aerosol Coalition and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Integrated Bioscience and Built Environment Consortium (IBEC).
Mr. Svirchev has authored and co-authored 17 peer-reviewed articles in the industrial hygiene, disaster management, and geology literature. He is an long term member of the International Affairs Committee of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, currently serving as Vice-Chair.