INPAA Safety Ambassadors

Ron has made a career investigating hazards and promoting community safety in Scandinavia and Australia.  From 1986, he formally monitored the occurrence of trauma in South Australia, as the initiator and manager of the state’s hospital-based injury surveillance system.

 

After graduating from the University of California with an MPH degree in maternal and child health, and a doctorate in epidemiology, Ron joined an injury-prevention team in Denmark, where he worked for three-and-a-half years, including a collaboration with the World Health Organisation.  Ron subsequently migrated to Australia to take up a research position in injury prevention at the University of Adelaide, where he maintained a formal academic appointment until recently. Earlier in his career he was a Peace Corps teacher trainer for two years in the Republic of the Philippines.  He works closely with various peak industry, consumer and safety bodies, including Standards Australia and Standards New Zealand.

 

Ron has been responsible for a number of significant regulatory changes affecting consumer-product safety, road safety and other issues.  He has appeared as an expert witness in coronial, civil and criminal cases, domestically and overseas.  For the last nine of his 30 years with the South Australian state government, Ron was Director, Epidemiology.  His world-leading innovation in infant sleep safety was recognised in 2013 with a prestigious prize awarded by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, which recently adopted Ron’s innovation as a new product-safety regulation.

 

In 2022, Ron invented and validated a much simplified method for assessing the rebreathing risk of infant sleep products.  He is currently working closely with the Infant and Nursery Products Alliance of Australia and with Standards Australia to introduce a new CO2 safety standard and to update the existing firmness standard.