June 5^th to 9th 2016, Bingbing Wu, Nancy Ngoc Giao Ly and Kelechi Isiugo represented students from the University of Cincinnati industrial hygiene and occupational medicine program at the New York New Jersey Historical Perspectives on Occupational Safety and Health tour. The tour began at Piscataway, New Jersey, with a bus conveying graduate students of industrial hygiene, ergonomics, safety engineering and residents of occupational medicine from different universities.

The Universities represented were CUNY School of Public Health, University of Cincinnati, University of Puerto Rico, New York University (NYU), Auburn University, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Rutgers University and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. There were 13 graduate students, 5 occupational medicine residents and 5 professors in total. Participants of the tour learned about occupational health and safety hazards associated with fishing, lumber, textile, granite, and paper mill industries. The first site visited was the Boot Cotton Mills Museum and Mill Girls Boarding House, Lowell, MA. Members of the tour group were able to see historical textile equipment used in the cotton industry during the American Industrial Revolution and learned about the neglect of occupational health and safety during the time period. It was learned that excessive noise was an intrinsic hazard associated with the heavy equipment used in the cotton mill and no hearing protection was provided to workers.

The other sites visited were Portland Fish Exchange Auction Facility, Sappi Paper, Skohegan, ME, Rock of Ages Granite Quarry, Barre, VT and Wightman Lumber, Portlanville, NY. Graduate students and occupational medicine residents were paired into groups and gave presentations on inherent and potential health and safety hazards associated with work tasks at the different facilities visited. The five-day tour ended on Thursday, June 9, 2016 and participants departed to their respective institutions.