A 2007 graduate of the College of Public Health, Hope Tiesman is a research epidemiologist with NIOSH in Morgantown, W.V. She credits her training with the Injury Prevention Research Center (IPRC) as helping her to not only secure a highly sought after position, but also to be able to enter it at full capacity.

“Right after I started my job,” she remembers, “there was a near-fatal beating of a teacher in Philadelphia. NIOSH worked with the largest teacher’s union to look at workplace violence in schools.” Without hesitation, Tiesman was able to propose, initiate, and run a study related to that initiative.

Currently, she is focused on non-traditional types of workplace violence, such as bullying among co-workers. She and her research team have found that verbal abuse between co-workers is a common behavior in some professions, but it is a kind of subtle violence that can have “much more of a detrimental impact both to health and one’s career.” She believes such bullying can affect a person’s well-being as much if not more than physical injury.

She also wants more public awareness of the fact that women are at greater risk of being killed on the job by their own husbands than by a co-worker. This kind of workplace violence is easy to overlook, she believes.

Tiesman says there are a handful of institutions that are leaders in injury prevention and control, and the University of Iowa is definitely one of them.

“Iowa is unique in that they have a lot of expertise in occupational safety and health, as well as injury prevention and control,” she says. “I feel very proud to say where I went to school!”

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of InSight