TRIUMF is pleased to welcome Mr. Rock Neveau as its Chief Safety Officer (CSO), effective April 26, 2021.
With Rock’s arrival, TRIUMF’s interim CSO, Joe Mildenberger, will move into the newly created role of Radiation Safety Officer, while Maxim Kinakin will serve as the Group Leader for the Radiation Protection Group.
As CSO, Rock will work to further strengthen and expand TRIUMF’s safety culture to allow us to continue delivering science safely and efficiently, while also ensuring that our values of Safety and Accountability are embedded in everything we do.
Rock arrives to TRIUMF with a strong track record of leadership and demonstrated expertise in both occupational and radiological safety, including over 25 years of experience providing radiological, industrial hygiene, and industrial safety support for a variety of nuclear facilities.
Most recently, Rock worked with a technology start-up developing a new ground-breaking particle accelerator in southern California. Before that, he served at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs as Manager, Health Physics Group (Ionizing & Non-Ionizing Radiation Safety), providing support for safety programs at several accelerator facilities and leading the implementation of policies and work control documents for the ionizing and non-ionizing (laser and UV-hazards) programs.
Coming from a nuclear engineering background, Rock also has extensive experience decommissioning nuclear facilities in the US, UK, and Japan overseen by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, US Department of Energy, UK-Office for Nuclear Regulation, and the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation.
We caught up with Rock to ask him a few questions about joining the lab:
Why TRIUMF? What interested you about the lab?
My work in the nuclear safety profession has provided a wide variety of experiences: environmental remediation, nuclear power generation, and supporting national research laboratories. Looking back, my most enjoyable time has been providing support for the type of research being performed at TRIUMF; with its many facilities supporting such a broad range of topics - often directly relating to the topics I'm reading about in scientific journals.
What are you most looking forward to about working at TRIUMF?
I am looking forward to getting back into working with a diverse range of technology and interacting with researchers from all over the world. I enjoyed my work at Lawrence Berkeley and the Oak Ridge National Labs because it allowed me to move around, collaborate, and learn about science and research on an international level.
What’s a fun fact about yourself that you’d like to share with the TRIUMF community?
From a safety program perspective, I recall how different it was in the early 1980s. We had to pay for all of our safety gear back then, and were charged through a "company store" for hard hats, protective chain mail gloves, steel-toe rubber boots, etc. The expense added up quickly, but they were nice enough to take a little out of our paychecks every week until it was all paid off. Times certainly have changed since then!
Welcome, Rock!