Presenter

Dr. Maryam Tabibzadeh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Management at the California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Her research has been focused on risk analysis in complex safety-critical and technology-intensive industries, such as healthcare, offshore drilling, and transportation sectors. Investigating the role of human and organizational factors, along with technological elements, in those industries has been a major focus of her research projects. As examples, in the offshore drilling industry, she has developed (both qualitative and quantitative) risk assessment methodologies to analyze the critical role of human and organizational factors in the safety of operations, with an emphasis on the negative pressure test, as a primary method to ascertain well integrity. In the healthcare industry, she has conducted research in the area of patient safety and development of proactive risk assessment methodologies to enhance safety culture and improve quality of care. Some examples of those projects are risk assessment of medical errors including unintended retained foreign objects and wrong site surgery in operating rooms, and systematic investigation of barriers of high quality of care in telehealth implementation. Some of her research on improving safety culture has been inspired by the nuclear industry and the NRC's introduced traits of a positive safety culture.

Maryam Tabibzadeh has presented and published papers in the areas of risk assessment and safety management, accident investigation and prevention, and interoperability analysis of multiple emergency response agencies in different peer-reviewed conferences and journals. She has also supervised more than 30 students in different research projects and published papers with them. As part of her accomplishments, she received the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award in 2022 and the Outstanding Engineering Achievement Merit Award in 2018 from The Engineers’ Council. She was the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Research Fellow at CSUN in 2021-2022. She received the Best Paper Award at the 2018 Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference, based on a research project on systematic root cause analysis of medication errors and enhancement of patient safety. She was also among the three finalists for the Human Factors Prize in 2015.