Every laboratory researcher must continuously address a key question: What makes the laboratory safe and how can safety outcomes be improved? Laboratory safety is a clear and common goal whether one is a researcher, supervisor, principal investigator or EH&S professional, but the approaches vary. This presentation will examine actions by researchers that improve safety and reduce accidents in laboratories. Recent cases of laboratory accidents in universities will be discussed in the context of ten principles of safe research that can serve as a guide for planning safer experiments.

Analytical chemistry tools, such as mass spectrometry, have been increasingly used to answer complex biological questions. For example, metabolomics and stable isotope tracing have revealed key biological molecules and their fluxes in both healthy and diseased conditions, providing potential drug targets. In this seminar, we will discuss how these techniques are used to discover novel biologically important molecules that organisms utilize to maintain whole-body metabolic homeostasis.