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2015 ChABSA Winter Scientific Workshops 

December 1, 2015

Morning & 8-Hour Sessions begin at 8:00 AM

Afternoon Sessions begin 1:00 PM

Breakfast/Registration 7:00 AM/Lunch Noon

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ChABSA is pleased to offer new this year's Winter Scientific Workshops.

Select Agents and Toxins: Response Preparation and Dual Use Technology Concerns (Vinod Jyothikumar and Brendlyn Faison) 4 hour course

 Security-sensitive microbes (viruses, bacteria, algae, fungi, and parasites) and/or their toxins have the capacity to cause severe Illness or death in humans, animals, or plants. Due to both their high potency and long latency periods, and the dearth of available point-of-care diagnostics tools, these agents are considered as potential bio-threats.  All of these features -- as well as potential difficulties detecting and identifying the particular threat, determining its potency, and measuring its levels in environmental settings -- create significant challenges in developing tools and reagents to recognize, confront, and manage agent-mediated illness. A vigilant and robust research community must be mobilized to characterize the existing agents further, to anticipate new variants or entirely new bio-threats, and to determine these agents’ weaponization potential. Medical, defense, and public health professionals, including both infectious-disease and toxicological specialists, must conduct fundamental research for the development of therapeutics. Public safety protocols must be re-examined, and inadvertent spread prevented. The private sector might then develop timely, appropriate, field-portable treatments and countermeasures and train first responders to use them. The threat is ongoing but the nation is poorly prepared. Now is the time to formulate a definitive roadmap for safe, secure, well-documented and -controlled procedures for the handling and storage of pathogens, toxigenic microbes, or the purified toxins themselves.

Biosafety and Biosecurity Issues in Global Health Security(Patricia Delarosa) 4 hour

The Global Health Security Agenda is an international effort that includes partners from U. S. government, academia and industry, seeking to establish, improve and modernize public health systems throughout the developing world.  This world-wide health program is unique in that it’s goal is to prevent, detect and respond to both outbreaks of emerging infectious disease and to biological terrorism events; promoting health security across the world.  One of the 9 objectives of the GHS agenda is to promote national biosafety and biosecurity systems.  This course explores the methodologies and challenges faced in the development and implementation of international biosafety and biosecurity programs through a mixture of lecture and interactive table top exercises. 

Topics include:
1. The fundamental tenants of the Global Health Security Agenda;
2. Case studies in infectious disease prevention and the impact of a functioning public health system on biosecurity;
3.  Components of a public health risk assessment and threat assessment.

Collaborative Negotiation Techniques in Support of Safety Initiatives (Matt Cronin) 8 hour

Participants will learn how to apply collaborative negotiation techniques so that compliance with safety  initiatives is less of an adversarial process, and those affected by the regulation may even be co-opted as advocates and advisees for the regulations.

Participants will learn:
1) How negotiation applies to compliance
2) How negotiation can be transformed from a zero-sum competition into a collaborative activity
3) How to "get what you want by helping others get what they want."
4) How to think about and use the basic levers of influence in the compliance setting

Implementing Personnel Security in Laboratory Biosecurity Programs (Ben Perman) 8 hour

 Personnel security is comprised of security measures detailed description of focused on people and behaviors rather than typical your proposed physical barrier approaches. Personnel security can be preconference course. thought as the "administrative controls" in any advanced This is limited to 10,000 security program. This course will teach administration, characters, including management, and researchers the basic principles of spacesthreat assessment and introduce students to the role of comprehensive personnel security in a laboratory biosecurity programs. The course is intended to give students a basic tool-kit that will allow them to implement successful comprehensive insider threat mitigation strategies using personnel security approaches at their home institutes and to convey concepts in personnel security to their colleagues. Students will be presented with relevant case studies in order to learn about relevant threats in the biomedical and health sectors. Students will learn about all aspects of personnel security including: suitability, reliability, peer and self reporting strategies, threat assessment, OPSEC, INFOSEC, and an introduction to elicitation, manipulation and surveillance awareness. These concepts will be put in to practice in interactive, live role-playing scenarios that include interview tactics, deception detection, elicitation, and surveillance detection. Regulatory issues relevant to implementation of personnel security management programs, in particular the Select Agent Regulations pertaining to Tier 1 agents, will also be discussed.