Joseph Vincelli: A strong grip on safety

Joseph Vincelli, radiation safety officer and occupational hygienist, is something of an occupational hazard himself.

When he greets you at the door of 3534 University, home of the Environmental Safety Office, and warmly extends his hand, beware. You are entering a high-risk area. Vincelli's handshake has the force of a vice-grip.

So much so that his boss, Wayne Wood, manager of the ESO, put a poster on his colleague's door prohibiting the practice: it's the drawing of two hands in a shake with a fat, black line through it. Too late for this visitor.

But Vincelli tries to make sure that his warnings about radioactivity don't come too late. The risk to health posed by radioactive materials, after all, exceeds the momentary discomfort of a compressed hand.

Warnings in this safety officer's mind, however, don't mean hanging masses of signs bearing the well-known symbol of radioactivity. Vincelli believes in education; through the three six-hour-long seminars he gives annually, he wants every one of the roughly 1,000 McGill researchers on both campuses who use radioactive material to know how to assess the risks in their labs, keep them to a minimum and to use the appropriate means of protection.

Patience, diplomacy, support from above and, occasionally, carrying a big stick are what's needed in this job, according to Vincelli, who, with the assistance of radiation technicians Bob Robb and Danny Alu, is responsible for the inspection of the University's 300 radioisotope-licensed labs.

Vincelli's goal is to use knowledge to help those too fearful of working with radioisotopes to overcome their fear and to convince those too arrogant to scrutinize their lab practices properly to gain a little humility in the name of common safety.

"When you're in control of a situation, you're not afraid," he says. "My job is to give them the tools and then let them decide how and when to use them."

Occasionally, education and patience go nowhere. Once, for instance, Vincelli, with Wood's blessing, had to threaten to change the lock of the lab of one delinquent researcher, who had already received a warning letter about his lax approach to safety. After that "he did really, really well," says Vincelli.

Vincelli's path to the ESO was a relatively straight one once the road to vet school appeared to be closed. Son of a mechanic father and "wonderful cook" of a mother, and relative of the famous Westmount Vincelli Gardeners, this first-generation Canadian followed his love of botany into studying biology at Concordia University where he discovered his "fascination" with radiation in a radiation biology course.

Later, while working as a lab technician at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Vincelli found that lab workers were poorly trained in handling radioactive materials, such as the isotopes used to mark cells in, for instance, experiments on metabolism.

Vincelli, who was injecting radioisotopes into patients, taught himself the necessary precautions, for his own safety and in order to explain the risks to patients.

"I was concerned regarding the public health issues and the occupational health issues. I realized that training has a big role to play."

Vincelli's interest in public and occupational health led to a job at the Environmental Safety Office on condition that he do a Master's in Occupational Health at McGill. His concern for the environment extends beyond the McGill campuses. His home, located on a corner lot in Ahunsic, is a "jungle" of birds, flowers, trees and vegetables. So much so that every fall, after he has made his tomato sauce, he gives away the rest of the tomatoes to the office.

But Vincelli's love for nature has its limits. Last summer, eight uninvited guests of the black and white and perfumed variety made themselves at home every evening on the lawn, merrily digging out the worms from Vincelli's completely organic lawn (he has three composters cooking at all times!). "When my girlfriend said: 'It's me or the skunks,' I called the city and set the cages." Even nature presents occupational hazards.

Bronwyn Chester

Part of being a university student has traditionally been to deck oneself out in one's school's colours and logos.

Baseball caps, t-shirts and backpacks emblazoned with the name of students' universities are typically amongst their first purchases when they arrive at the schools to begin their studies. The collegiate apparel industry in the U.S does $1.6-billion in business each year.

But students, particularly in the U.S., are starting to ask tough questions about where those caps and t-shirts are being produced. In the wake of scandals involving Nike and Wal-Mart using overseas sweatshops with poor working conditions to produce their items, university products are coming under tougher scrutiny.

At Duke University, for instance, a student group called Students Against Sweatshops lobbied the university for an anti-sweatshop code. The group was invited by a responsive administration to help draft a new code of conduct for licensees.

Harvard University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of California and Ohio State University are currently collaborating on a year-long investigation into the manufacture of university-licensed apparel. The universities are looking into working conditions in factories where products bearing the names of the schools are produced.

"Many universities have accepted the responsibility of taking action to see that clothing bearing our names is made under safe and humane conditions," says Allan Ryan Jr., an attorney in Harvard's Office of the General Counsel.

It's equivalent to letting them loose in an enormous research library rather than in the children's section.


Library and information studies professor Andrew Large, talking with The Toronto Star about how the Internet isn't an ideal classroom tool for young children. Large recently led a McGill study that concluded that the Internet was too unwieldy for young kids and that books and CD-ROMs, tailored specifically for children, were more effective.

ILLUSTRATION: TZIGANE

Want to be among the top 151 Chief Executive Officers in Canada?

Well, according to a survey conducted by National Post Business, if you're a male, as are 80 per cent of these business aces, you'd best study engineering.

Yes, odd as it sounds, more members of this select group were likely to have degrees in engineering than in business management -- McGill engineering graduates John Roth (Nortel Networks) and Michael Sopko (Inco), to name two.

Fewer than one in six of the CEOs had an MBA and lawyers and accountants were almost as numerous as the MBA-holders.

Furthermore, while almost all of the CEOs had an undergraduate degree, most had nothing beyond. And, while one might expect many of the Canadian-educated business leaders to have attended the likes of McGill (10), the University of Toronto (17) and the University of Western Ontario (10), the University of Manitoba (9) proved to be the choice of more members of this elite than Queen's University (6), the University of Alberta (5) or UBC (4).

Quebec-trained CEOs proved to have equally unpredictable university backgrounds -- the unheralded Université de Sherbrooke took credit for seven of the CEOs' 27 degrees, well within range of big shots HEC and Laval, who boasted only nine each.

Education seems to play a bigger role where women and francophones are concerned. The four women to make this list had nine degrees amongst them while two thirds of the francophones had graduate degrees, as compared to only one third of the anglophones.

What does this all mean? Perhaps nothing more than that there's more to being a business leader than having a brand-name MBA. Or as Gregg Blachford, director of McGill's Career and Placement Service, tells many a graduating student: "Your degree and your university help you get the first job, but after that, it's the experience that counts."

It just goes to show you, you can be a miserable son of a bitch and still be perceived as a great businessman.


Management professor Henry Mintzberg, talking about automobile pioneer Henry Ford with The Globe and Mail. Ford, widely hailed as a visionary, was also an autocratic, union-busting anti-Semite. He was selected by Fortune as the leading businessman of the century.