“The symposium featured two keynote speakers; Dr. James Dearing from Keiser Permanente and Jordan Barab, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health. Dr. Dearing’s keynote congratulated the NORA sector-based approach for bringing those together who could accomplish diffusion of research results and challenged all researchers to learn and apply the many additional lessons he outlined from the field of Diffusion of Innovations.

 “Mr. Barab spoke of the realities of the current systems for regulation, enforcement, and compliance assistance and emphasized the necessity for new research results to point the way toward future improvements in occupational safety and health.

 “In a special session on impact, Barbara Braun of the Joint Commission and Vern Anderson of NIOSH spoke of the high hopes and sober realities of new developing partnership efforts made possible by the sector-based approach of NORA. Additionally, Janie Gittleman of The Center for Construction Research and Training-CPWR highlighted some of the many research-to-practice (r2p) accomplishments of their well-established and very successful partnership with NIOSH and many others.

 “Another special session focused on partnerships. Max Lum, former NIOSH Associate Director for Health Communication, described the many facets of r2p. Additionally three researchers described the innovative and unique opportunities they have developed from their university base to successfully impact workers’ lives: Carol Rice, University of Cincinnati; Margaret Quinn, University of Massachusetts at Lowell; and Pam Tau Lee, University of California Berkeley (retired).”