| Faculty Bios |
| Melissa Afterman MS-HFE, CPE Ergonomics Consultant University of California, San Francisco Melissa Afterman is a consulting ergonomist working in Northern California. Her work focuses on program development, risk assessment and mitigation for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies supporting office and mobile knowledge workers and also for laboratory and plant tools, tasks and processes. Melissa earned her Bachelor’s degree from Cal Poly SLO in BioResource/Agricultural Engineering and her Master’s degree in Human Factors/Ergonomics Engineering from San Jose State University. She is a board Certified Professional Ergonomist and regularly shares the learnings from her practice at local and national ergonomics conferences. | |
| Alan Barr Principal Development Engineer, Ergonomics Program UC Berkeley Alan Barr is Principal Development Engineer for the Ergonomics Program at UC Berkeley. His undergraduate degree was the biomechanics track of the Exercise Science BS degree at Davis. Ever since completing that degree, almost 20 years ago, he has been studying how the human body interacts with and responds to physical factors in the real world. He has a strong curiosity and understanding of the physical demands placed on the human body during a wide range of human activity. For the last 17 years he has been employed as an engineer with the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at UCSF and the primary engineer for the Ergonomics Graduate Training Program at UC Berkeley. He has spent the last 13 years collaborating on research related directly to health and safety issues surrounding the use of hand-operated drills as they are used in concrete drilling. As part of his research, he has designed and built many prototypes to be formally studied as effective interventions in mitigating potentially harmful effects associated with traditional drilling methods. He has also been the primary engineer on three CPWR/NIOSH funded projects designing and evaluating jigs and other interventions for concrete drilling that have led to several peer reviewed publications. | |
| Carisa Harris PhD, CPE, PT Director UCSF/UCB Ergonomics Research & Graduate Training Program Dr. Harris is Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at UC San Francisco and in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. She is also the Director of the UCSF/UCB Ergonomics Research & Graduate Training Program. Dr. Harris’ current research ranges from epidemiological studies on healthy worker survivor bias in the assessment of physical, personal and work psychosocial factors associated with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and subsequent work disability to the development of personal monitoring devices to quantify physical exposures on the individual level. She also collaborates on numerous other projects at the UC Ergonomics lab that explore the ergonomic improvements for endoscopists, hand-arm computer interactions (gestures), work related cardiovascular strain, sedantarianism and the impact of exoskeleton devices on manual material handlers. | |
| Meg Honan RPT, MS, CPE Ergonomics Consultant University of California, San Francisco Meg Honan is Principal Ergonomist at Genentech, California. Her ergonomics experience has focused on employee work area and work method assessment, and ergonomics program development in Plant, Laboratory, R&D and Office work environments. At Genentech, the Ergonomics Group supports a staff of 14,000 on the South San Francisco site. She works with interdisciplinary teams, including design, process and production engineers, EHS and safety teams to integrate ergonomics into the Genentech’s continuous improvement process. She is a board Certified Professional Ergonomist with a MS in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, which included a research focus on wrist and shoulder postures during alternative keyboard use. Prior to her degree in ergonomics, Meg had over ten years of clinical experience as a Physical Therapist, specializing in treatment of work-related injuries and development of skills-based back education and training programs. She is a member of the Office Ergonomics Research Committee (OERC) and HFES. | |
| Jim Potvin PhD Owner Potvin Biomechanics Inc. Jim Potvin received a B.H.K. in Kinesiology from the University of Windsor (1986) and a M.Sc. (1988) and Ph.D. (1992) in biomechanics from the University of Waterloo. He was a professor for 23 years at the University of Guelph, University of Windsor and McMaster University, where is he now a Professor Emeritus. He is also the owner of Potvin Biomechanics Inc. Jim researches in the areas of biomechanics and physical ergonomics. His basic research focuses on the study of joint mechanics and muscle fatigue and his applied research focuses on developing valid ergonomic methods to quantify injury risk in the workplace; including the assessment of manual materials handling tasks and the evaluation of risk of upper limb disorders. Jim has supervised 70 graduate students and employed 57 graduates and published over 75 scientific articles. | |
