Award-Winning Labs Share Everyday Safety Practices

An ergonomic mouse. A lending library of field gear. A Slack channel where small safety questions are welcome.

These are a few ways this year’s UC Davis Lab Safety Award winners keep safety in their daily routine. Across field sites, chemistry labs and computer screens, their practices encourage team members to ask questions, prepare for hazards and look out for one another.

"When you have a safety culture, there is a thriving understanding of the logic and the why, and you have buy-in from your team," said Veronica Thron, research safety manager with Environmental Health and Safety, who organizes the Lab Safety Awards. “A good safety culture can also become self-sustaining.”

The winners earned near-perfect annual Lab Safety Review scores, plus additional points through extra-credit questions and surveys. 

Here they share approaches other labs and safety professionals across campus can put to use.

The Eviner Lab won the grand prize in the 2026 Lab Safety Awards. 

Show your team it’s OK to take a break

This year’s grand prize-winning lab is led by Valerie Eviner, ecosystem ecologist and professor in the Department of Plant Sciences. Her research focuses on restoration ecology, including how plant ecosystems recover from wildfires, invasive plants and livestock grazing.

The Eviner Lab works in a wide variety of sites, including remote grasslands, riparian systems, agricultural fields, greenhouses, a chemical lab and a soil lab on campus. All members of the Eviner Lab regularly engage in field research — including up to 10 undergraduate students who rotate through the lab each year. 

Eviner herself models that there are days when you might need a break, to help encourage lab members to prioritize human safety.

“With every new member of the lab, on our first field days, I fake a need to take a break, due to heat or tiredness, modeling that it is important to take breaks as needed,” she said. “Heat is something where our dose response is different from day to day, and lab members who are more junior might feel less comfortable calling a time out.”

She also maintains a lending library of necessary field gear, to help make sure all lab members are safe and comfortable. 

“We make it clear that the success of our research relies on us looking out for each other, regularly communicating, following protocols, and looking for ways to improve safety and adjust,” Eviner said.

Preparing for field visits requires they go beyond usual protocols of safety to prepare for a wide variety of potential hazards  — weather, wildlife, road conditions, fire potential, livestock, tripping hazards and plant hazards. During the rainy season, her team has driven around a bend to find the road blocked by a fresh landslide. Conversely, in the dry season when wildfire risk is high, they sometimes plan field visits strategically for an easier exit as the day heats up. 

They also take care with safety protocols as environmental stewards, to avoid introducing something new or invasive as they move plants, soil, seeds and potentially microbes between California locations.

About the awards

Each year, more than 980 UC Davis laboratories participate in the lab safety review program, run by EH&S, which feeds into the Lab Safety Awards.

Each college or school presents a $1,000 cash prize cash to their winning lab. The grand prize winner earns an additional $5,000 from Safety Services and the Office of Research, plus the UC Davis Lab Safety Award trophy. 

Lab Safety Awards are presented by UC Davis leaders during an event on Oct. 22. Look for coverage in Dateline after the event.

Learn more about the other Lab Safety Award winners.